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Although the consequences of illicit financial outflows on the economies of the world continue to exert adverse impacts on many economies of the world, explanations regarding specific drivers of the illicit outflows remain divergent in the literature. This study aims to investigate the effect of financial liberalisation on illicit financial outflows in Africa. Furthermore, the study also examines the effect of macroeconomic stability and institutional quality on illicit outflows.

To achieve the objectives, the study uses a dynamic panel system generalised method of moments technique to analyse annual data from the period 1995 to 2015 of 22 African countries.

The results show that financial liberalisation helps to reduce illicit capital outflows. Furthermore, improved institutional quality is associated with lower levels of capital outflows, thus affirming the theoretical expectations that stable political environment boost investor confidence. Overall, the study show that financial liberalisation reduces illicit outflows. However, liberalisation without sound macroeconomic stability and institutional quality may avail opportunities for illicit outflows.

The main limitation of the study was lack of data that spans periods beyond 2015 for most of the variables on financial illicit flows. The available data sources could not test the objectives beyond 2015.

Current literature on the relationship between financial liberalisation and illicit fund outflows are generally conducted in the context implications on economic growth. However, beyond economic growth, financial liberalisation may impact on illicit financial outflows. Furthermore, other institutional and macroeconomic dynamics may influence illicit financial outflow, especially for developing economies in Africa.

This paper aims to reveal the green governance role played by stock connect in transition economies from the perspective of corporates’ environmental violations and provides implications for the coordination and optimization of subsequent stock market liberalization and green transformation policies in pursuit of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals.

With the data of Chinese listed enterprises, this paper takes the Shanghai-Hong Kong Stock Connect or Shenzhen-Hong Kong Stock Connect in China as a quasi-natural experiment and applies the multi-period difference-in-difference (DID) model to identify the impact of stock market liberalization on the corporates’ environmental violations.

The findings reveal that the stock market liberalization significantly restrains the corporates’ environmental violations. These findings are robust to a series of sensitivity tests, including excluding two-way effects, adjusting the year of policy implementation, replacing the core variables, introducing the regional fixed effects and excluding the interference effect of other relevant policies during the sample period. Furthermore, the stock market liberalization is beneficial for upgrading information disclosure quality, improving internal governance capability, strengthening environmental protection incentives, and thus restrains corporates’ environmental violations. Meanwhile, heterogeneity tests show that the inhibitory effects are more significant in those grouped samples which is large scale, state-owned nature, located in eastern region, with poor evaluation performances and heavy tax burden.

We make two marginal contributions to the current literature. First, this paper enriches the literature on the factors influencing corporate environmental violations by focusing on how the macro-level financial policy influences the micro-level corporate environmental violations. One the one hand, prior studies mainly focused on the consequences of corporate environmental violations; however, there is still a puzzle that the effect of stock market liberalization cannot be fully justified to influence corporate environmental violations. The findings help explain this puzzle by examining that stock market liberalization can restrain corporate environmental violations. Moreover, prior studies mainly focused on corporate share price (Yunsen Chen et al., 2022), market liquidity (Han Kim and Singal, 2000), information disclosure (Liang, Lin, and Chin 2012), corporate governance (Bae and Goyal, 2010) and corporate violations (Lingyun Xiong et al., 2021), but not on corporate environmental violations. We assume that the suppression effect of stock market liberalization on corporate environmental violations can help reduce corporate environmental violations, improve corporates’ awareness of environmental compliance. Second, this paper contributes to a better understanding of the literature on stock market liberalization by investigating the restraining effect of Stock Connect on corporate environmental violations from the perspective of information channel, corporate governance channel and motivation channel, which is of practical significance. Moreover, we investigate the differences in the inhibitory effects of stock market liberalization on different enterprises' environmental violations, from firm size, property rights, enterprise assessment results, tax burden to geographical location, which is conducive to the construction of a green financial system and the promotion of sustainable economic development. Our results show that firms which are large scale, state-owned nature, located in eastern region, with poor evaluation performances and heavy tax burden tend to compliance with environmental laws. These findings emphasize the importance and benefits of Stock Connect.

In spite of the extensive literature on the regulation of air transport services, until the development of the Quantitative Air Services Agreements Review (QUASAR) methodology no systematic review existed of the degree of liberalization granted through air services agreements. The chapter lays out QUASARs key features, and presents the main results its application has generated. It then elaborates on how the methodology could be further refined and extended to other segments of the air transport industry yet uncovered. Based on QUASAR, the chapter critically evaluates some commonly held beliefs about the liberalization of international passenger transport and then moves on to explore the technical feasibility of creating a liberal multilateral regime for air transport services. QUASAR has demonstrated that, although the air transport sector has experienced some liberalization over the past few years, this has been, overall, rather marginal. The skies are not truly open.

This chapter reviews the effects of air transport liberalization, and investigates the roles played by airport-airline vertical arrangements in liberalizing markets. Our investigation concludes that liberalization has led to substantial economic and traffic growth. Such positive outcomes are mainly due to increased competition and efficiency gains in the airline industry, and positive externalities to the overall economy. Liberalization allows airlines to optimize their networks, and thus may introduce substantial demand and financial uncertainty to airports. Vertical arrangements between airlines and airports may offer a wide range of benefits to the parties involved, yet such arrangements could also lead to airline entry barriers which reduce the effects of liberalization. Three approaches have been developed to model the effects of liberalization in complex market conditions, which include the analytical, econometric and computational network methods. These approaches should be selectively utilized in policy studies on liberalization.

Vietnam is a land that has seen turbulent past and has faced huge damage as being a land for proxy war between the USA and the USSR, but yet it has risen and liberated itself out by adapting renovation or Doi-Moi as it is formally called in Vietnam. The purpose of this chapter is to identify the major impact of trade liberalization and trade integration on the Vietnamese economy. Through this chapter we have tried to bring out the changes that took place in the Vietnamese economy post liberalization. The structural change that took place in the Vietnamese economy due to liberalization is analyzed in this chapter. We have used paired sample T-test and Chow Test (F-Test) to observe the change as Vietnam joined the WTO. The effect that the various policy and FTA that Vietnam had after joining the WTO will be analyzed through this chapter.

Financial and capital liberalization can play a fundamental role in increasing growth and welfare. Typically, emerging or developing economies seek foreign savings to solve the inter-temporal savings-investment problem. On the other hand, current account surplus countries seek opportunities to invest their savings. To the extent that capital flows from surplus to deficit countries are well intermediated and put to the most productive use, they increase welfare. Liberalization can, however, also be risky, as has been witnessed in many past and recent financial, currency and banking crises. It can make countries more vulnerable to exogenous shocks. In particular, if serious macroeconomic imbalances exist in a recipient country, and if the financial sector is weak, be it in terms of risk management, prudential regulation and supervision, large capital flows can easily lead to serious financial, banking or currency crises. A number of recent crises, like those in East Asia, Mexico, Russia, Brazil and Turkey (described, for example, in International Monetary Fund (IMF), 2001), and, to some extent, the Argentinean Crisis of late 2001, early 2002, have demonstrated the potential risks associated with financial and capital flows liberalization (Prasad et al., 2003).

The purpose of the paper is to investigate the quantitative effect of import liberalization on tariff revenue in Ghana.

In an attempt to achieve the objective of the paper, a robust decomposition analytical approach was used to examine how different components of the sources of change in import tax contribute to changes in import tax revenue in Ghana.

The paper concludes that Ghana suffered some revenue loss from the liberalization by reducing the level of average official duty rates, but gained in revenue as a result of real currency depreciation.

It has been suggested that public policy should aim at determining and targeting the optimum level of the average official import duty rates, focus on the identification of the major sources of duty revenue leakage, and substitute sales taxes for tariffs to improve tax revenue sufficiently.

This paper makes explicit the contribution of alternative import policy features to changes in import tax revenue in Ghana.

Trade and environment are essential issues closely related to the development of the national economy and the improvement of people’s livelihood in the new era. The Report to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China (CPC) listed the construction of a strong trading power as an important part of building a modern economic system and pollution prevention and treatment as one of the three key battles to win the decisive victory of building a moderately prosperous society in all respects. However, the relationship between trade and environmental pollution is still very controversial in the existing literature, and there is a paucity of literature on the relationship between trade and environmental pollution based on micro data.

This paper merged China’s Firm-Level Pollution Database with China’s Industrial Enterprise Database and China’s industry tariff rates. Additionally, by virtue of the quasi-natural experiment of China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), a difference in difference (DID) model was constructed to alleviate the endogeneity issue.

According to the results, the trade barrier decrease (trade liberalization) significantly reduces the intensity of SO₂ emissions, a major pollutant of enterprises, as the intensity of SO₂ emissions decreased 2.16% for each unit decrease of the trade barrier. The analysis of the mechanisms shows that the SO₂ emission intensity of enterprises is mainly due to the decrease of enterprises’ pollution emission rather than the decrease of output, and the decrease of enterprises’ pollution emission is mainly caused by the enterprises’ cleaner production process rather than the end treatment of pollution emission. The decrease of coal use intensity is an important mechanism of the decrease of SO₂ emission intensity caused by the decrease of trade barriers. Among the technical effects of the change of the trade barrier affecting enterprises’ pollution emission, biased technical change rather than neutral technical change dominates.

The findings of this paper imply that expanding openness can enhance China’s social welfare not only through the economic growth mechanisms identified in the classical literature, but also through environmental improvements. This provides useful policy insights for promoting the construction of a strong trading power and winning the battle against pollution in the new era.

This paper aims to examine the impact of stock market liberalization on efficiency of the stock markets in Latin America.

Daily stock indices from Latin American countries, including Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, are used in the analysis. To examine the impact of stock market liberalization on efficiency, the authors use several approaches, including the runs test, Chow–Denning multiple variation ratio test, Wright variance ratio test, the martingale hypothesis test and the stochastic dominance (SD) test, on the above Latin American stock market indices.

The authors find that stock market liberalization does not improve stock market efficiency in Latin America.

This investigation is among the first to examine the impact of stock market liberalization on the efficiency of the stock markets. It is among the first to examine the impact of stock market liberalization on the efficiency of the Latin American stock markets. It is also among the first to apply the martingale hypothesis test and a SD approach on issue about efficient market.

There is a large body of literature on the link between trade liberalisation, growth and poverty. However, less attention has been paid to the relationship between trade and regional disparities. The purpose of this paper is to identify and quantify the regional impacts of trade liberalisation, particularly in the war-affected regions and to understand to what extent trade reforms can contribute to the post-war recovery process and long-term economic and political stability in Sri Lanka.

The authors developed a single country multi-regional computable general equilibrium (CGE) model for the Sri Lankan economy to meet the need for a detailed country study as emphasised in the recent literature.

Both short-run and long-run results suggest that all regions including war-affected regions in the country gain from trade liberalisation, although gains are uneven across regions. Furthermore, the results suggest that war-affected regions gain more relative to some other regions in the long run.

According to the best of the authors’ knowledge within country regional impact of trade liberalisation using a multi-regional CGE model has never been attempted for Sri Lanka. The results of this study, even though based on Sri Lankan data, will be relevant to other developing countries engulfed in internal conflicts with regional economic disparities.