The Unassuming Economist

From a paper by Thanh Nguyen, Son Nghiem, and Anh-Tuan Doan:

“The convergence tests showed no overall convergence but revealed convergence clubs for each factor. Granger causality tests indicated short-run bi-directional relationships between the variables. Long-run panel regression analysis confirmed that technological progress significantly improves per capita income and energy diversification. Additionally, it revealed bi-directional relationships between energy diversification and financial development, a uni-directional relationship from financial development to per capita income and a U-shaped effect of per capita income on energy diversification, with a turning point at $67,112.8 per year.”

From a paper by Roshnay R. Britz, Adefemi A. Obalade, and Anthanasius F. Tita:

“The Russia-Ukraine invasion presents one of the most trending news in 2022. Economies having solid ties with Russia are exposed to the contagion effects of the crisis. The South African economy is strongly linked to Russia via international trade and the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) alliance. This study investigates the impact of the Russia-Ukraine invasion on daily and monthly commodity prices in South Africa for the 2015-2023 period. The study applies descriptive statistics, dummy regression model and sub-period analysis to evaluate wheat prices, oil prices and inflation rate before and during the Russia-Ukraine invasion. The descriptive analysis and regression results indicate an increase in wheat prices, oil prices and inflation rates during the post-invasion period compared to the pre-invasion period. This implies a significant impact of the Russia-Ukraine invasion on these economic indicators in South Africa. Policy implications of the findings are highlighted in the concluding section.”

From a paper by Mohamed Ben Omar Ndiaye, Ebrima K Ceesay, and Yahaya M Moussa:

“In the theoretical literature, the relationship between primary producer commodity prices and economic change has been confirmed. Therefore, this paper examines sub-Saharan African countries’ experiences pertaining to commodity price variation. The main purpose of this article is to examine the impact of commodity price instability in sub-Saharan Africa. To do so, panel data models are used to solve the problems of unobserved variables. The results reveal that the current growth of commodity prices has a positive effect on the growth of the economy. However, the logs of the lags and logs of the leads of the commodity price have negative impacts on the growth of the economy. That means that commodity price variations will continue to harm the economies of sub-Saharan African countries.”

From a paper by Huan Huu Nguyen, Nam Anh Tran Nguyen and Phuong Thao Le Thi:

“This study uses public emotions shown through social media to identify public sentiment toward the current Russia-Ukraine war. Utilizing the development of natural language processing algorithms, this study tests the correlation between the public psychological factor and the fluctuation in financial markets and energy prices during the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. This study emphasizes the public’s initial response to this event (from 1/2022 to 5/2022). It aims to evaluate the public sentiment on sudden shock instead of taking the incident comprehensively. The study results ascertain the public sentiment index contained from social media as a market indicator. During shock events such as the Russia-Ukraine war, public sentiment intensifies energy and financial asset price fluctuation, indicating that public psychology tends to be influenced by negative news and causes them to act accordingly, resulting in a sell-off in financial and energy markets.”

From a paper by Melike Bildirici, Özgür Ömer Ersin and Godwin Olasehinde-Williams:

“We argue that climate policy uncertainty can lead to a unique type of regulatory arbitrage whereby domestic firms respond to fluctuations between lax and stringent environmental regulations by relocating their production processes to jurisdictions with minimal environmental policies that could affect their profitability. The presence of uncertainty-driven environmental regulatory arbitrage may consequently contribute to the emergence of regions or countries that act as havens. This phenomenon could intensify internal carbon leakage, especially in economies with ambitious climate targets, as efforts to manage the risks associated with uncertain policies involuntarily result in increased carbon emissions elsewhere. Over time, this could lead to a rise in emissions displacement due to higher imports from abroad. To back up our claim with empirical evidence, we specifically study the internal carbon leakage in the EU15 countries resulting from the climate policy uncertainty. The analysis covers the period 1990–2022. A battery of econometric techniques is adopted—Fourier and conventional unit root tests, cointegration testing within the Fourier ARDL framework, short and long-run estimations within the Fourier ARDL framework, as well as Fourier Granger causality testing. By employing this battery of testing methodologies, we ensure robustness and thus the credibility of the study findings. Overall, after controlling for the effects of ecological innovation, environmental policy stringency, and the real GDP, we find that increases in climate policy uncertainty raise internal carbon leakage contemporaneously and that internal carbon leakage declines as climate policy uncertainty dies out over time in the long along with the short term. Furthermore, causality results reveal that climate policy uncertainty is a significant predictor of internal carbon leakage into the European Union. This study therefore identifies climate policy uncertainty as a potential source of idiosyncratic and systemic risk that aggravates internal carbon leakage as European Union products get replaced by more carbon-intensive imports.”