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This paper aims to address two fundamental questions: (1) How has Bahrain's industrial policy evolved during the 21st century? and (2) what factors contribute to this evolution?

Utilizing secondary data, this paper identifies key decision-makers responsible for economic policy in Bahrain and delineates the evolution of Bahrain's industrial policy throughout the 21st century. Subsequently, it employs a series of interviews with elite civil servants engaged in the formulation and implementation of Bahrain's economic policies to understand the reasons behind the observed changes.

Since assuming the role of Crown Prince in 1999, Sh. Salman bin Hamad Al Khalifa has been the key economic decision-maker in Bahrain. During the 21st century, Bahrain has shifted away from decisions closely aligned with the Washington Consensus towards those more in line with classical industrial policy. Interviews reveal that the private sector's underperformance in job creation, coupled with fiscal pressures, has driven this departure from the Washington Consensus. Moreover, the early successes of the interventionist Saudi Vision 2030 and Bahrain's own success in technocratically managing the COVID-19 pandemic have accelerated this transition.

Insights into the determinants of Bahrain's industrial policy can guide policymakers in refining future strategies. Recognizing the positive role of intellectual developments in academic economics literature becomes crucial for informed decision-making.

This paper fills a gap in the existing literature by providing answers to its research questions, particularly considering the significant changes witnessed in Bahrain's industrial policy post-pandemic.

This chapter examines the influence of external public borrowing resources on economic progress in Tunisia. The study focuses on two stages: First, the influence is studied in a direct sense and then in an indirect sense, i.e., through a transmission channel of this influence. By applying the autoregressive distributed technique with staggered lags (ARDL), over a period ranging from 1986 to 2019, the results showed that the influence of external borrowing resources on growth seems to be unfavorable in the short term but positive in the long term, hence the importance of the empirical technique chosen. Second, three interaction variables were tested, namely total government expenditure, government investment expenditure, and the real effective exchange rate. The results obtained call for better attention to the channels identified to maximize the positive influence of external public debt on the country's economic progress.

The study investigates the effectiveness of government policies to mitigate the impact of a pandemic. The study adopts the small open economy of Nigeria for the following reasons. First, Nigeria is the largest economy in SSA. Second, Nigeria was also significantly impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The study employed the time-varying structural autoregressive (TVSVAR) model to control for the potential asymmetry in fiscal variables and to control for the shift in the structural shift, following a macroeconomic shock. As a form of robustness, the study also implements the time-varying Granger causality to formally assess the temporal instability of the variable of interest.

The results show that an oil price shock is an important source of macroeconomic instability in Nigeria. Importantly, the results indicate that the effects of fiscal policy are strongly time varying. Specifically, the results show that fiscal policy helps to stabilize the economy, (i.e. they help to reduce inflation and spur output growth) following macroeconomic shock. Further, the Granger test shows that fiscal policy helped to spur growth in Nigeria. The research and policy implications are discussed.

The study accounts for the time-varying effects of fiscal policy.

The interview traces the early discussions in the context of disasters as developmental failures.

The transcript and video was developed in the context of a United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) project on the history of DRR.

The interview traces the development of disaster risk reduction discussions in different contexts such as “LA RED” network in Latin America.

The interview clearly highlights the need to not forget the early thoughts on vulnerability and disaster risk.

This study aims to assess the efficiency of Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa (BRICS) countries in achieving sustainable development by analyzing their ability to convert resources and technological innovations into sustainable outcomes.

Using data envelopment analysis (DEA), the study evaluates the economic, environmental and social efficiency of BRICS countries over the period 2010–2018. It ranks these countries based on their sustainable development performance and compares them to the period 2000–2007.

The study reveals varied efficiency levels among BRICS countries. Russia and South Africa lead in certain sustainable development aspects. South Africa excels in environmental sustainability, whereas Brazil is efficient in resource utilization for sustainable growth. China and India, despite economic growth, face challenges such as pollution and lower quality of life.

The study’s findings are constrained by the DEA methodology and the selection of variables. It highlights the need for more nuanced research incorporating recent global events such as the COVID-19 pandemic and geopolitical shifts.

Insights from this study can inform targeted and effective sustainability strategies in BRICS nations, focusing on areas such as industrial quality improvement, employment conditions and environmental policies.

The study underscores the importance of balancing economic growth with social and environmental considerations, highlighting the need for policies addressing inequality, poverty and environmental degradation.

This research provides a unique comparative analysis of BRICS countries’ sustainable development efficiency, challenging conventional perceptions and offering a new perspective on their progress.

The purpose of this study is to provide a comprehensive analysis on the economic relationship between trade openness and economic growth and to identify current developments, potential research area and future directions. The emphasis is on the identification of annual growth of publications, country-wise distribution, publication pattern, intellectual structure and cluster analysis of scientific production in this field.

This study used evaluative techniques, text mining approach and performance analysis to identify possible patterns and correlation and to measure the impact of authors/citations/scientific production. Further, this study used the bibliometric mapping to represent the structural features of scientific production. This study emphasized on identification of the research hotspots based on occurrence of indexed keywords, productive researchers and journals during 2000–2022. Further, cluster analysis is performed using VOS viewer to analyze the current dynamics and future direction of the association between trade openness and economic growth (Eck and Waltman, 2011). Also, co-citation analysis is used in this study to identify the relations among authors or journals or documents using citation data, whereas the bibliographic coupling/mapping is intended to analyze the citing documents. Similarly, co-word analysis is used to study the article keywords that are mainly used to assess the conceptual structure of a concerning subject.

Economic growth is a function of trade openness, and it is important to analyze the relationship between trade openness and economic growth. Trade openness tends to become more liberalized over time, to contribute more to economic growth. Empirical evidence suggested that there exists a strong association between trade openness and economic growth. Further, keyword timeline analysis illustrated that the linkage between trade openness and economic growth is current area of interest among researchers. As per bibliometric analysis, China, Pakistan and Malaysia are the three most prolific countries in the terms of published articles on this theme. However, the most influential publications based on h-index and citation on trade openness–economic growth relationship is produced by Turkey. Based on cluster analysis, this study suggests that researchers are currently working on trade openness–economic growth relationship with other variables such as FDI, financial development, labor force, environment degradation and carbon emission, while in future, researchers could work on variables such as technology and sustainable development.

There are some limitations of this study. The first limitation is the authors have used Scopus database, leaving the possibility for future research to use Web of Science, Google Scholar or other similar sources. The second limitation is that the authors have used search terms “trade openness “and “economic growth,” although research could be performed using synonyms or even relevant terms in other languages.

Cluster analysis suggested that researchers are currently working on trade openness–economic growth relationship with other variables such as FDI, financial development, labor force, environment degradation and carbon emission, while in future, researchers could work on variables such as technology and sustainable development. Therefore, this study identified the potential research area in this research domain.

To confirm the originality of this study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to combine bibliometric analysis and cluster analysis on trade openness–economic growth relationship. This study makes a comparison with phenomena/processes/events in contemporary economic and social reality in the field of trade openness and economic growth relationship.

Social initiatives must disclose their results to access support. However, there is no theoretical consensus about how to do it. It is still necessary to understand the value creation in social initiatives because they may or not have economic goals. However, these goals serve to make the social ones feasible. This study aims to cut this Gordian knot by providing measures aligned to the value theory but developed by the social lens. It offers a non-economic-focused approach to dealing with assessment complexity and with multiple stakeholders’ needs for information.

A consolidation research path is suggested by three composed measures built upon tested and reliable scales. These value measures are discussed through narratives from Portuguese investors and social entrepreneurs in a mixed-methods design. Content analysis and online survey provided data for descriptive statistics, exploratory factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha test.

The analyses supported the value measures. Thus, they allow an effective way to assess and report the social value created. It also highlighted a potential use in preventive and corrective approaches helpful for several organizations that pursue social goals.

The measures were tested based on social entrepreneurs' opinions. Future studies can include beneficiaries' opinions, allowing comparisons that can help to set more realistic goals and better investment criteria.

The relationship between investors and initiatives can improve, boosting their impact on society. The measures can highlight prioritization choices that influence the way value is created. Hence, they serve as a sensemaking from a holistic standpoint.

The paper provides a detailed historical account of Douglass C. North's early intellectual contributions and analytical developments in pursuing a Grand Theory for why some countries are rich and others poor.

The author approaches the discussion using a theoretical and historical reconstruction based on published and unpublished materials.

The systematic, continuous and profound attempt to answer the Smithian social coordination problem shaped North's journey from being a young serious Marxist to becoming one of the founders of New Institutional Economics. In the process, he was converted in the early 1950s into a rigid neoclassical economist, being one of the leaders in promoting New Economic History. The success of the cliometric revolution exposed the frailties of the movement itself, namely, the limitations of neoclassical economic theory to explain economic growth and social change. Incorporating transaction costs, the institutional framework in which property rights and contracts are measured, defined and enforced assumes a prominent role in explaining economic performance.

In the early 1970s, North adopted a naive theory of institutions and property rights still grounded in neoclassical assumptions. Institutional and organizational analysis is modeled as a social maximizing efficient equilibrium outcome. However, the increasing tension between the neoclassical theoretical apparatus and its failure to account for contrasting political and institutional structures, diverging economic paths and social change propelled the modification of its assumptions and progressive conceptual innovation. In the later 1970s and early 1980s, North abandoned the efficiency view and gradually became more critical of the objective rationality postulate. In this intellectual movement, North's avant-garde research program contributed significantly to the creation of New Institutional Economics.

The conflict between institutionalism and neoclassicism in the 20th century has been investigated by scholars over the years. Many of them believe that in the postwar period, neoclassicism triumphed while institutionalism largely disappeared. The present chapter takes a very different view. The late 20th century represents a broad synthesis of neoclassical and institutional themes in a methodology we call pragmatic empiricism. That approach combines the mathematical model building and theoretical formalism of neoclassical economics with the institutional economist’s data-driven statistical analysis and concern for developing institutional forms. We use as a case study the history of American locational economics from the 1930s to the present. The mixing of institutional and neoclassical themes is quite evident in the work of three young scholars at Harvard who effectively initiated American locational economics. In the postwar period, we find a series of outstanding, well-published papers that capture the spirit of the “founders.” These papers do use more modeling, but they also focus on major institutional developments. A broader review of locational works is consistent with the pragmatic empiricism label. The history of locational economics supports the claim that institutionalism, far from disappearing, continues to provide fundamental questions and techniques for modern pragmatic empiricism.