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This study forecasts the government expenditure components in Nigeria, including recurrent and capital expenditures for 2021 and 2022, based on data from 1981 to 2020.

The study employs statistical/econometric problems using the Feasible Quasi Generalized Least Squares approach. Expenditure forecasts involve three simulation scenarios: (1) do nothing where the economy follows its natural path; (2) an optimistic scenario, where the economy grows by specific percentages and (3) a pessimistic scenario that defines specific economic contractions.

The estimation model is informed by Wagner's law specifying a positive link between economic activities and public spending. Model estimation affirms the expected positive relationship and is relevant for generating forecasts. The out-of-sample results show that a higher proportion of the total government expenditure (7.6% in 2021 and 15.6% in 2022) is required to achieve a predefined growth target (5%).

This study offers empirical evidence that specifically requires Nigeria to invest a ratio of 3 to 1 or more in capital expenditure to recurrent expenditure for the economy to be guided on growth.

This paper examines the effect of bond market development on economic growth of selected developing countries from 1990 to 2020. Previous studies provide inconsistent results on the effect of bond market development on economic growth. Some results reveal positive effects while others show negative effects of bond market development on economic growth. These conflicting findings have motivated research.

The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and co-integration methods are used for analysis. The gross domestic product per capita proxies economic growth while government bond capitalisation and corporate bond capitalisation measure bond market development.

The findings unveil a long-term effect within the series. The results disclose that government bond capitalisation, trade openness and inflation positively affect economic growth while corporate bond capitalisation and domestic credit to the private sector presents negative effects on economic growth.

The results propose that the governments should issue more bonds to raise funds for long-term economic growth initiatives. The governments should promote bond market development such that the corporate bonds issued boost economic growth by limiting lengthy documentations and bottlenecks in the bond market listing and issue procedures. The policymakers and regulatory authorities should implement policies which attract investors and encourage companies' listing in the countries' bond markets.

The study’s findings add value that government bond capitalisation positively impacts economic growth, while corporate bond capitalisation negatively affects economic growth in developing countries.

Standard economic theory predicts that any increase in public spending is accompanied by a rise in inflation in an economy. This paper presents empirical proof that prices do not always rise with an increase in public expenditure but only up to a certain threshold level. The primary aim of this paper is to unearth the government size-inflation nexus in India for the period from 1971 to 2019.

The logistic STAR (smooth transition autoregression) model is employed to unravel the government size-inflation nexus for the Indian economy from a non-linear perspective.

The finding of our study confirm the non-linear relationship between the size of the government and inflation in India. The estimated threshold level for government size is precisely found to be 9.27%. The size of the government exerts a negative influence on inflation until it reaches the optimal or threshold level. Any further increase in the size of government beyond this threshold level would result in a rise in inflation.

The findings have implications for the conduct of fiscal policy. Policymakers can increase government spending in a regime of small government size without having any inflationary impacts by generating revenues from taxes and other sources instead of relying much on the central bank. In the regime of a large-sized government, adhering strictly to the discipline in the conduct of fiscal and monetary policies would help curb inflation and enhance growth synchronously, hence alleviating any loss of welfare.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is an attempt to revisit the government size-inflation nexus in India from a non-linear perspective using the Smooth Transition Autoregression (STAR) model for the first time.

This study aims to investigate the public deficit issue by contrasting conventional and Islamic views encompassing the paradigm, technical base, orientation and consequence detailed in nine discussions, which are rarely investigated in the research. There is a predisposition that contemporary Muslim scholars discuss the public deficit as well as the private sector perspective, which is used in the conventional conception, without riba as a primary feature.

The paper develops a comparative approach that derives two perspectives from the available literature using the qualitative method under the critical thinking method. It was drawn up in detail on how the paradigm and its related budgeting process contribute to public deficits, mainly in government institutions.

The paper reveals a prominent difference in public deficit in the Islamic view from a conventional perspective. From 9 points of comparison, the analysis covers 18 discussion that differentiates between private and public area criticism seems to overlap. The foundation giving a unique perspective in Islam toward public deficit is the concept of ownership that differs from capitalism, mainly the function of public spending is to distribute the wealth among people not for economic growth. The Islamic Government spent for public purposes based on cash-basis budgeting. The budgeting system in Islamic public spending is founded on treasure availability.

The paper uses a qualitative method that cannot empirically snapshot the actual or factual condition, in which subjectivity plays a plausible role. Furthermore, there is no actual sample (best practices) of the concept to be examined.

The research encompasses overlap between Islamic and conventional perspectives, including public and private issues regarding public deficits. The main beneficiary of the paper is a policymaker, including academicians or practitioners who are appropriate to use the concept in their circumstances.

The study is a pioneering study in public deficit comprehensively comparing conventional and Islamic perspectives and drawing up conceptual and technical aspects.

South African public debt has recently increased significantly and has reached worrying levels. This study aims to examine the debt threshold effects on economic growth in South Africa, with an objective of suggesting a debt threshold as South African policymakers will seek to reduce debt to a sustainable level in the coming years.

The study applies a recent novel methodology advanced by Hansen (2017) that allows modelling a regression kink with an unknown threshold.

The findings of this study indicate a robust debt threshold of 37% of gross domestic product (GDP). Below this threshold, debt is growth-enhancing, but above 37% of GDP, debt is harmful to growth in South Africa.

Among other things, to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio, South Africa will need a fiscal consolidation policy by undertaking reforms to state-owned companies to reduce their reliance on public funds, as well as putting in place economic measures to boost long-term growth. The country should also improve tax collection in order to realize additional tax revenue through enhancing compliance and other revenue collection measures.

Most of the existing studies on debt threshold effects in Africa are panel data studies, which assume parameter homogeneity, by determining a single debt threshold value applicable to all countries. This can be misleading as the debt-growth nexus is country-specific, being conditional on several factors, such as institutional quality. The present study applies a recent novel methodology, which allows to model a regression kink with an unknown threshold, for the case of South Africa. The methodology endogenously determines the debt threshold while also allowing a country-specific analysis.

The reality with many developing countries is that the countries have failed to create enough jobs for the poor and vulnerable. Under such circumstances, vulnerable employment plays a critical role in providing earning opportunities to people who are unemployed and determining the economic and social progress of such economies. The study aims to examine the possible non-linear relationship between vulnerable employment and growth in light of this background.

The study employed five-yearly averaged data of 73 developing countries for the period 2000–2019. The empirical analysis is performed using the dynamic panel data analysis and the two-step system generalised method of moments (GMM) approach. The estimations are run separately for male, female and total vulnerable employment. The threshold levels are obtained using Sasabuchi (1980) and Lind and Mehlum (2010) (SLM) test. Several sensitivity checks are performed to validate the results.

The findings of the study suggest a non-linear U-shaped relationship between vulnerable employment and growth. Thus, a positive association between vulnerable employment and growth is witnessed at higher levels of vulnerable employment. At lower levels, the relationship is negative. Threshold levels for male, female and total vulnerable employment are 46.80%, 49.29 and 50.94%, respectively. Therefore, vulnerable employment beyond the threshold levels is found to be positively associated with growth.

Countries below the threshold level of vulnerable employment should understand why these workers are not able to contribute to the growth despite working so hard. If any socio-economic barriers hinder their contribution towards growth, such barriers require greater policy attention. Countries with vulnerable employment levels above the threshold level should recognise the contributions of these workers towards the growth and actively support them in increasing their economic contribution. In either case, given the precarious circumstances under which these workers work and the pittance earnings, policy interventions aimed at ensuring decent working conditions and better earnings for these workers are encouraged.

The current study is the first one to examine the relationship between vulnerable employment and growth to the best of the author's knowledge. As such, it makes novel contributions to the literature on development policy.

This study explores the relationship between economic freedom and gender ideologies on the allocation of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries. Opportunity entrepreneurship is typically understood as one’s best option for work, whereas necessity entrepreneurship describes the choice as driven by no better option for work. Specifically, we examine how economic freedom (i.e. each country’s policies that facilitate voluntary exchange) and gender ideologies (i.e. each country’s propensity for gendered separate spheres) affect the distribution of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship across countries.

We construct our sample by matching data from the following country-level sources: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s Adult Population Survey (APS), the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom Index (EFI), the European/World Value Survey’s Integrated Values Survey (IVS) gender equality index, and other covariates from the IVS, Varieties of Democracy (V-dem) World Bank (WB) databases. Our final sample consists of 729 observations from 109 countries between 2006 and 2018. Entrepreneurial activity motivations are measured by the ratio of the percentage of women’s opportunity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship to the percentage of female necessity-driven total nascent and early-stage entrepreneurship at the country level. Due to a first-order autoregressive process and heteroskedastic cross-sectional dependence in our panel, we estimate a fixed-effect regression with robust standard errors clustered by country.

After controlling for multiple macro-level factors, we find two interesting findings. First, economic freedom positively affects the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. We find that the size of government, sound money, and business and credit regulations play the most important role in shaping the distribution of contextual motivations over time and between countries. However, this effect appears to benefit efficiency and innovation economies more than factor economies in our sub-sample analysis. Second, gender ideologies of political equality positively affect the ratio of women’s opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship, and this effect is most pronounced for efficiency economies.

This study offers one critical contribution to the entrepreneurship literature by demonstrating how economic freedom and gender ideologies shape the distribution of contextual motivation for women’s entrepreneurship cross-culturally. We answer calls to better understand the variation within women’s entrepreneurship instead of comparing women’s and men’s entrepreneurial activity. As a result, our study sheds light on how structural aspects of societies shape the allocation of women’s entrepreneurial motivations through their institutional arrangements.

This study aims to develop a model for coordination and communication overhead in distributed software development through case study analysis in the Indian outsourcing software industry. The model is based on business knowledge, which can be classified as domain, regulatory, strategic, business process and operation process knowledge as per existing literature.

Double case study method was used to verify an existing knowledge–management framework of software development from the literature. The stakeholders of both the cases were interviewed, and project documents were verified to reach conclusions.

The findings supported the business knowledge classification from the literature. The concept can be used to analyze the software project in a distributed environment.

The research work findings are based only on two case studies. The study findings cannot be generalized and should be used as a learning tool. There can be large variations of project characteristics with differences in business knowledge requirements. The research shows the importance of business knowledge transfer in global software development.

Projects managers in the distributed software development environment can use the findings in project planning and work allocation for better control over cost and schedule, etc.

There is little research works attempted to study the business knowledge classification in the global software industry making the research novel.

This study examines the differences in the economic stimulus effects, transmission mechanisms, and output multipliers of government consumption, government traditional investment, and government science and technology investment.

This study constructs and estimates a New Keynesian model of endogenous technological progress embedded in the research and development (R&D) and technology transfer sectors. Using Chinese macroeconomic time series data from 1996 to 2019, this study calibrates and estimates the model and analyzes the impulse response function and a counterfactual simulation of expenditure structure adjustment.

The results show that compared with the traditional dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, the endogenous process of technological progress amplifies the impact of government consumption shock and traditional government investment shock on the macroeconomy, leading to greater economic cycle fluctuations. As government investment in science and technology has positive external spillover effects on firm R&D activities and the application of innovation achievements, it can promote more sustainable economic growth than government consumption and traditional investment in the long run.

This study constructs an extended New Keynesian model with different types of government spending, which includes endogenous technological progress within the R&D and technology transfer sectors, thereby linking fiscal policy, business cycle fluctuations and long-term economic growth. This model can study the macroeconomic impact of fiscal expenditure structure adjustment when fiscal expansion is limited. In the Bayesian estimation of model parameters, this study not only uses macroeconomic variables but also adds a sequence of private R&D investment.

This study examines the nexus of bond market development and economic growth from 2015 to 2022.

The system-generalized method of moments (GMM) is employed on economic growth, government market capitalization, corporate market capitalization, bond yield, interest rate spread, trade openness and investment level.

The findings show that the government bond market, corporate bond capitalization and bond yield positively impact the gross domestic product (GDP). The results equally reveal a causal link between the corporate bond market, bond yield and GDP.

Governments should emphasize creating, developing and sustaining bond markets in the economies of developing countries to boost economic activity by promoting structural transformation. Policymakers should improve the implementation of existing rules and regulations while complementing them with new ones since well-developed bond markets provide alternative sources of financing that make economies financially resilient. Policymakers should encourage the issuance of corporate bonds to enhance the efficiency of the capital markets and mobilize funds for economic growth stimulation. Governments and corporations should diversify their sources of funding into the bond markets since the bond yields are favorable to economic growth.

Earlier studies presented arguable results on the bond market development and economic growth nexus. Several findings indicate a positive link; others give a negative link between bond market development and economic growth. Some show causal directions, while other reveal none. The contradictory results motivate research. This research results contribute to the literature in that the government bond market, corporate bond capitalization and bond yield positively impact the GDP of developing nations.