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The purpose of this paper is to determine best practices of aid agencies for outsourcing logistics to commercial logistics service providers (LSPs) in disaster relief. Moreover, it evaluates the application of the Delphi method for research in humanitarian logistics.

The paper is based on a two-round Delphi study with 31 experts from aid agencies and a complementary full-day focus group with 12 experts from aid agencies and LSPs.

The study revealed 12 best practices for outsourcing logistics in disaster relief and a compilation of more than 100 activities for putting these practices into action. Experts consider a proper balance between efficiency and compliance, a detailed contract and a detailed service request most important. Additionally, the Delphi method was found to be a promising technique for research on humanitarian logistics.

By critically examining the Delphi method, this study establishes the basis for a wider application of the technique in the field of humanitarian logistics. Furthermore, it can help to prioritize future research as the ranking of practices reflects the priorities of practitioners.

The paper provides guidance to practitioners at aid agencies in charge of outsourcing logistics.

This research is one of the first in the field of humanitarian logistics to apply the Delphi method. Moreover, it addresses the lack of literature dealing with approaches for building successful cross-sectoral partnerships.

This paper aims to deepen the understanding of the relationship between global economic uncertainty and price volatility, specifically focusing on commodity, industrial materials and energy price indices as proxies for global inflation, analyzing data from 1997 to 2020.

The dynamic conditional correlation generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model is used to study the dynamic relationship between variables over a while.

The results demonstrated a positive relationship between commodity prices and the global economic policy uncertainty (GEPU). Except for 1999–2000 and 2006–2008, the results of the energy price index model were very similar to those of the commodity price index. A predominant positive relationship is observed focusing on the connection between GEPU and the industrial material price index. The results of the pairwise Granger causality reveal a unidirectional relationship between the GEPU – the Global Commodity Price Index – and the GEPU – the Global Industrial Material Price Index. However, there is bidirectional causality between the GEPU – the Global Energy Price Index. In sum, changes in price indices can be driven by GEPU as a political factor indicating unfavorable economic conditions.

This paper provides a deeper understanding of the role of global uncertainty in the global inflation process. It fills the gap in the literature by empirically investigating the dynamic movements of global uncertainty and the three most important groups of prices.

This study aims to examine the symmetric and asymmetric impact of external debt on inflation in Sudan from 1970 to 2020 within a multivariate framework by including money supply and the nominal effective exchange rate as additional inflation determinants.

The authors utilize an Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to examine the symmetric impact of external debt on inflation, while the asymmetric impact is examined using a Nonlinear ARDL (NARDL) model. The existence of a long-run relationship between inflation and external debt is tested using the bounds-testing approach to cointegration, and a vector error-correction model is estimated to determine the short parameters of equilibrium dynamics.

The linear ARDL model results show that external debt has no statistically significant impact on inflation in the long run. On the contrary, the results of the NARDL model show that positive and negative external debt shocks statistically affect inflation in the long run. The estimated long-run elasticity coefficients of the linear and nonlinear ARDL models reveal that the domestic money supply has a statistically significant positive impact on inflation. In contrast, the nominal effective exchange rate has a statistically significant negative impact on inflation.

The reliance on symmetric analysis may not be sufficient to uncover the existence of a linkage between external debt and inflation. Proper external debt management is crucial to control inflation rates in Sudan.

To date, no empirical study has assessed the external debt-inflation nexus and its potential asymmetry in Sudan, and the current study aims to fill this gap in the literature.

The author analyzes households' inflation expectations data for India, collected quarterly by the RBI for more than a decade. The contribution of this paper lies in two folds. First, this study examines the relationship between relatively recent inflation expectations survey of households (IESH) and the actual inflation for India. Secondly, the author employs a structural VAR with the time period 2006 Q2 to 2020 Q2 on inflation expectation survey data of India. A short-term non-recursive restriction is imposed in the model in order to capture the simultaneous co-dependence causal effect of inflation expectation and realized inflation.

This paper studies the dynamic behavior of inflation expectations survey data in two folds. First, the author analyzes the time series property of the survey data. The author begins with testing the stationarity property of the series, followed by the casual relationship between the expected and actual inflation. The author further examines the short-run and long-run behavior of the IESH with actual inflation. Employing autoregressive distributed lag and Johansen co-integration, the author tested if a long-run relationship exists between the variables. In the second approach, the author investigates the determinants of inflation expectations by employing a non-recursive SVAR model.

The preliminary explanatory test reveals that inflation expectation is a policy variable and should be used in monetary policy as an instrument variable. The model identifies the price puzzle for India. The author finds that the response of inflation to a monetary policy shock is neutral. The results also indicate that the expectations of the general public are self-fulfilling.

IESH has only commenced from September 2005, hence is relatively new as compared to other survey in developed countries. Being a new data set so far, the author could not locate any study devoted in analyzing the behavior of the data with other macroeconomic variables.

This paper aims to uncover the nexus between budget deficits, money growth and inflation in Vietnam in the period 1995–2012.

The paper uses a structural vector auto-regressive model of five endogenous variables including inflation, real GDP growth, budget deficit growth, money growth and the interest rate.

It is found that inflation rose in response to positive shocks to money growth and that budget deficits had no significant impact on money growth and therefore inflation. This empirical evidence supports the hypothesis that fiscal and monetary policies were relatively independent. Money growth significantly decreased in response to a positive shock to inflation; interest rates had no significant effect on inflation but considerably increased in response to positive inflation shocks. This implies that the monetary base was more effective than interest rates in fighting inflation.

This paper sheds light into understanding the link between budget deficits, money growth and inflation in Vietnam during the high-inflation period 1995–2012. The finding supports the hypothesis that fiscal and monetary policies were relatively independent over the period.

This study aims to investigate, for the first time in the literature, the stochastic properties of the US aggregate health-care price inflation rate series, using the data on health-care inflation rates for a panel of 17 major US urban areas for the period 1966-2006.

This goal is undertaken by applying the first- and second-generation panel unit root tests and the panel stationary test developed recently by Carrion-i-Silvestre et al. (2005) that allows for endogenously determined multiple structural breaks and is flexible enough to control for the presence of cross-sectional dependence.

The empirical findings indicate that after controlling for the presence of cross-sectional dependence, finite sample bias, and asymptotic normality, the US aggregate health-care price inflation rate series can be characterized as a non-stationary process and not as a regime-wise stationary innovation process.

The research findings apply to understanding of health-care sector price escalation in US urban areas. These findings have timely implications for the understanding of the data structure and, therefore, constructs of economic models of urban health-care price inflation rates. The results confirming the presence of a unit root indicating a high degree of inflationary persistence in the health sector suggests need for further studies on health-care inflation rate persistence using the alternative measures of persistence. This study’s conclusions do not apply to non-urban areas.

The mean and variance of US urban health-care inflation rate are not constant. Therefore, insurers and policy rate setters need good understanding of the interplay of the various factors driving the explosive health-care insurance rates over the large US metropolitan landscape. The study findings have implications for health-care insurance premium rate setting, health-care inflation econometric modeling and forecasting.

Payers (private and public employers) of health-care insurance rates in US urban areas should evaluate the value of benefits received in relation to the skyrocketing rise of health-care insurance premiums.

This is the first empirical research focusing on the shape of urban health-care inflation rates in the USA.

This study aims to examine the influence of socioeconomic development on inflation in South Asia using the foreign exchange rate and money supply as control variables.

The study uses annual panel data for five South Asian economies, namely, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka over the period 1990–2018, applies cointegrating regression techniques, namely, the panel dynamic ordinary least square (OLS) and fully modified OLS estimators to examine the long-run relations and conducts the Toda-Yamamoto Granger causality test to detect the direction of causality among variables.

The cointegrating regression estimations have documented that the socioeconomic development proxied by the human development index (HDI) has no significant impact on inflation. Although economic development represented by gross domestic product (GDP) growth causes inflation, socioeconomic development represented by HDI has no impact on inflation and has demonstrated as a better macroeconomic indicator, and thus creates no inflationary pressure in the economy. The foreign exchange rate has a positive impact on inflation. The broad money supply has the usual positive effect on domestic inflation that endorses the monetarist view about prices. The Toda-Yamamoto Granger causality test has confirmed several unidirectional causalities: inflation causes HDI, money supply causes both inflation and HDI and the foreign exchange rate causes HDI.

The study has practical implications for policymakers in South Asia, to improve HDI, particularly GDP per capita, education and health-care facilities to realize continuous socioeconomic development, which will take care of inflation. Moreover, these counties may follow a conservative monetary policy to control inflationary pressure in their economies.

The study is original and claims to be the first to examine the impact of socioeconomic development on inflation. The findings have socioeconomic values regarding controlling inflation in South Asia.

This paper analyzes variations in the effects of monetary and fiscal shocks on responses of macroeconomic variables, determinacy region, and welfare costs due to changes in trend inflation.

The authors develop the New-Keynesian model, in which the central banks can employ either nominal interest rate (IR rule) or money supply (MS rule) to conduct monetary policies. They also use their capital and recurrent spending budgets to conduct fiscal policies. By using the simulated method of moment (SMM) for parameter estimation, the authors characterize Vietnam's economy during 1996Q1–2015Q1.

The results report that consequences of monetary policy and fiscal policy shocks become more serious if there is a rise in trend inflation. Furthermore, the money supply might not be an effective instrument, and using the government budget for recurrent spending produces severe consequences in the high-trend inflation economy.

This paper's findings are critical for economists and monetary and fiscal authorities in effectively designing both the monetary and fiscal policies in confronting the shift in the inflation targets.

This is the first paper that examines the effects of trend inflation on the monetary and fiscal policy implementation in the case of Vietnam.

This study examines the roles of cross-sectional dependence, asymmetric structure and country-to-country policy variations in the inflation-poverty reduction causal nexus in selected sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries from 1981 to 2019.

To account for cross-sectional dependence, heterogeneity and policy variations across countries in the inflation-poverty reduction causal nexus, this study uses robust Hatemi-J data decomposition procedures and a battery of second-generation techniques. These techniques include cross-sectional dependency tests, panel unit root tests, slope homogeneity tests and the Dumitrescu-Hurlin panel Granger non-causality approach.

Unlike existing studies, the panel and country-specific findings exhibit several dimensions of asymmetric causality in the inflation-poverty nexus. Positive inflationary shocks Granger-causes poverty reduction through investment and employment opportunities that benefit the impoverished in SSA. These findings align with country-specific analyses of Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Mauritania, South Africa and Togo. Also, a decline in poverty causes inflation to increase in the Congo Republic, Madagascar, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo. All panel and country-specific analyses reveal at least one dimension of asymmetric causality or another.

All stakeholders and policymakers must pay adequate attention to issues of asymmetric structures, nonlinearities and country-to-country policy variations to address country-specific issues and the socioeconomic problems in the probable causal nexus between the high incidence of extreme poverty and double-digit inflation rates in most SSA countries.

Studies on the inflation-poverty nexus are not uncommon in economic literature. Most existing studies focus on inflation’s effect on poverty. Existing studies that examine the inflation-poverty causal relationship covertly assume no asymmetric structure and nonlinearity. Also, the issues of cross-sectional dependence and heterogeneity are unexplored in the causal link in existing studies. All panel studies covertly impose homogeneous policies on countries in the causality. This study relaxes this supposition by allowing policies to vary across countries in the panel framework. Thus, this study makes three-dimensional contributions to increasing understanding of the inflation-poverty nexus.

This study attempts to explain the impact of Fintech on the Asian economies through two main indicators, inflation and unemployment over the period 2011-2014-2017.

This study uses panel data regression models to explain the relationship between Fintech, inflation as an indicator of currency circulation and unemployment since Fintech has disrupted the labor market.

Empirical results show a consistently strong and positive relationship between the development of financial technologies and the reduction of inflation and unemployment unless these technologies are actively used. Digital finance has become a new driver of economic development. Therefore, governors should not only improve their economies but also expand their information and communication technologies to develop their digital infrastructure, especially for businesses.

The present study contributes to the existing literature on the impact of disruptive digital innovation on the socioeconomic development of emerging countries. The empirical evidence highlights the importance of distinguishing between active and passive uses of Fintech in order to anticipate its economic impact.