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This study aims to assess the technological capability of Chinese internet platforms (BAT: Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) compared to US ones (GAFA: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple). More specifically, this study explores Baidu’s technological catching-up process with Google by analyzing their patent textual information.

The authors retrieved 26,383 Google patents and 6,695 Baidu patents from PATSTAT 2019 Spring version. The collected patent documents were vectorized using the Word2Vec model first, and then K-means clustering was applied to visualize the technological space of two firms. Finally, novel indicators were proposed to capture the technological catching-up process between Baidu and Google.

The results show that Baidu follows a trend of US rather than Chinese technology which suggests Baidu is aggressively seeking to catch up with US players in the process of its technological development. At the same time, the impact index of Baidu patents increases over time, reflecting its upgrading of technological competitiveness.

This study proposed a new method to analyze technology mapping and evolution based on patent text information. As both US and China are crucial players in the internet industry, it is vital for policymakers in third countries to understand the technological capacity and competitiveness of both countries to develop strategic partnerships effectively.

Injections of foreign direct investment (FDI) are often followed by injections of foreign culture which may not be well received among the local population. If this is the case, culture may impede any positive externalities from FDI. On the other hand, if the people of the host country embrace injections of FDI, this may lead to boosts in not only short-run factors of production but also longer-term technological spillovers. We measure what role cultural make-up of a country plays on the effect of FDI on growth in GDP.

Using values system data from the World Values Survey (WVS), and socioeconomic data from the World Bank, we estimate and plot the marginal effect of FDI on growth as a function of a country's values system for a panel of 73 countries over a span of three decades.

We find that the marginal effect of FDI on growth in GDP differs across varying degrees of cultural values, even after adjusting for level of development. In other words, our analysis indicates that a country's cultural norms do indeed affect foreign investment's impact on economic growth.

To date there is no research that systematically assesses the effect that cultural make-up has on the marginal effect of FDI on growth. We go beyond the use of isolated cultural variables by using data on cultural dimensions that account for most of the observed cultural differences between countries. We believe our findings will work as a launchpad for more novel ways to capture country heterogeneity in growth research.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-09-2019-0549.

The main purpose of this paper is to explore size of the shadow economy of 31 European Countries in 2014 and size of the shadow economy of 28 European Union countries over 2003-2014 (in per cent of official GDP). An additional objective is to identify tax evasion, as the problem of all the EU countries, answering the questions how better combat the tax fraud.

Estimates of the shadow economy for all 28 European Union countries and other three countries from Europe, i.e. Norway, Switzerland and Turkey – MIMIC method was applied.

The average size of the shadow economy in 28 EU countries was 22.6 per cent in 2003 and decreased to 18.6 per cent (of official GDP) in 2014. We also consider the most important driving forces of the shadow economy. The biggest ones are with 14.6 per cent unemployment and self-employment, followed by tax morale with 14.5 per cent and GDP growth with 14.3 per cent. The proportion of tax evasion (accounting for indirect taxation and self-employment activities) was on average 4.2 per cent (of official GDP) in Poland, 1.9 per cent in Germany and 2.9 per cent in the Czech Republic.

The MIMIC statistics do not address a large part of the wholly illegal economy (of typically criminal nature) and, accordingly, it is not an absolute magnitude of the whole unofficial economy. However, it does not seem that other, alternative, methods of measuring the unofficial economy are better in individual terms.

Current statistical research should lead to practical acceptance in the framework of need for developing better organizational & legal ways for multi-level governance within the European Union, leading to effective methods of counteracting – in particular intra-Union fraud. In addition, the presentation of a review of typology of the main theories and studies regarding the unofficial economy aspects relating to tax evasion constitutes a practical review of the pursued research areas.

Safeguarding the national economy as a whole, by seeking ways of reducing the scope of shadow economy.

Both regarding presentation of the latest shadow economy estimates and typology of its main studies and theories.

The dependence of farmers on money lenders for agricultural credit despite the penetration of the formal financial sector with subsidized interest rates remains an economic puzzle. The purpose of this paper is to revisit the relationship between money lenders and farmers in the presence of trade-loan nexus.

The study provides a theoretical framework supported by empirical evidence. It uses primary survey data of farmers in a major potato producing district of West Bengal, India. For the empirical analysis, apart from descriptive statistics, the authors use a logit regression model to derive insights from some testable hypotheses.

The study finds that trade-loan nexus increases defaults on agricultural loans through two channels: first, by increasing loan requirement and repayment obligations through high input prices and interest rates, respectively; and second, by reducing income of farmers by setting low prices for the output.

The functioning of money lenders in rural areas, including their sources of finance and political control over local economy, and the existing social hierarchies in the rural context will have to be studied in detail to understand the complexities of the issue.

The findings of the study underline the need for policy initiatives to break the trade-loan nexus to reduce the dependence of farmers on money lenders.

The higher defaults help the money lender to sustain in the rural agricultural loan market as the formal sector becomes reluctant to lend in the presence of pervasive defaults.

The study is entirely original based on primary survey data of seven blocks of a major potato producing district in West Bengal, India. It could be the first such study on the subject. The findings are fresh and expected to contribute to development economics and agriculture finance literature and policy making.

This paper investigates the corruption-growth relationship in a sample of 146 countries for the period – 1984-2009. While negative effects of corruption on growth have drawn economists’ interest in recent years, our main contribution is to examine the effects by employing the hierarchical polynomial regression to evaluate the relationship after controlling economic and institutional factors.

The results are estimated using panel generalized methods of moments.

The results challenge some of the findings that negative growth-corruption association in the literature but also provide some new inferences. The findings reflect that corruption is not always growth-inhibitory; for some countries it is growth-enhancing, which supports the “greasing-the-wheels” hypothesis.

The paper investigates the growth-corruption relationship using panel generalised methods of moments. Our results suggest that a cubic function best fitted the data. The finding suggests that in the medium corrupt countries corruption stimulates growth by reducing red-tape.

Given some similarities in the banking industry and economic condition across Vietnam, China and India, the purpose of this paper is to estimate and compare the cost and revenue efficiency of banks across these three countries over the period 1995–2011.

This study employs the meta-frontier of Battese et al. (2004) and O’Donnell et al. (2008) which envelops the three country-frontiers to measure the cost and revenue efficiency of banks in these three countries.

This study finds that Chinese banks adopt the most advanced cost-reducing and revenue-increasing technology when providing banking products to their customers, followed by Indian banks. Indian banks are as cost-efficient as Chinese banks, but more cost-efficient than Vietnamese banks. Indian banks are as revenue-efficient as Vietnamese banks, but less revenue-efficient than Chinese banks. Over the analysis period, banks in the three countries have employed the more advanced technology in reducing costs, and they have become more cost-efficient. Nonetheless, for revenue side, the improvement in revenue efficiency and adopted technology are observed only in Chinese banks. The main source of meta-cost and meta-revenue inefficiency of these banking systems stems from undertaking inferior technology rather than managerial ability. Results from comparison across bank types show that state-owned banks (SOBs) are more cost and revenue-efficient than privately owned banks, with Indian and Chinese SOBs being the most cost- and revenue-efficient, respectively.

To improve meta-cost efficiency, Chinese and Indian banks would constitute a relevant benchmark for Vietnamese banks, while to improve meta-revenue efficiency, Chinese banks would be considered as a relevant benchmark for Vietnamese and Indian banks.

This is the first study which utilizes meta-frontier to compare cost and revenue efficiency and technology across banks in Vietnam, China and India.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role that different financial sources and financial specialization have on private research and development (R&D) activity in OECD countries.

The authors developed several panel regressions choosing as a final model a two-way random effects regression to understand which funding sources are related to the R&D expenditure, and how financial specialization has links to the private portion of R&D aggregated expenditure. The authors include data from the years 2000 to 2016 for OECD countries.

The results reinforce the critical role that stock markets have in enhancing private R&D and that bond markets have an inverse relationship with private R&D national expenditures. The authors do not find evidence of a link between bank sources and private R&D. Specialized financial systems (banking or market) support innovation in a better way than a mixed arrangement of those two systems.

The findings of this study have considerable policy implications. Policymakers need to be aware of these results, given that some variables related to financial markets, seems to boost the inputs for R&D. In the long term, this could be a signal that national and regional systems of innovation need a broad view of the factors hampering scientific activity, and also a signal that there are other ways to impact the results of the complex innovation activity through the development of stronger financial systems backing up national systems of innovation.

The authors found that the long discussion about the financial system that a country has to choose to enhance growth with R&D&I may have been misleading the public policy. The findings show that rather than a bank or a stock market financial system, economies looking to boost R&D&I, must specialize in one of the two systems, deepen these and generate the appropriate policies to promote science, technology and innovation using those financial markets.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of inflationary shocks on inequality, using data of selected countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Inflationary shocks were measured as deviations from core inflation, based on a genetic algorithm. Bayesian quantile regression was used to estimate the impact of inflationary shocks in different levels of inequality.

The results showed that inflationary shocks substantially affect countries with higher levels of inequality, thus suggesting that the detrimental impact of inflation is exacerbated by the high division of classes in a country.

The study contributes to the literature about the relationship between inflation and inequality by proposing that not only the sustained increase in prices but also the inflationary shocks – the deviations from core inflation – contribute to the generation of inequality. Also, to the best of the authors knowledge, the relationship between inflation shocks and inequality in the MENA region has never been analyzed before, thus creating a research gap to provide additional empirical evidence about the sources of inequality. Additionally, the authors contribute with a methodological approach to measure inflationary shocks, based on a semelparous genetic algorithm.

The purpose of this paper is to review policy or guidance on the implementation of Section 5(4) written by NHS mental health trusts in England and health boards in Wales.

A Freedom of Information request was submitted to all trusts in England (n=57) and health boards in Wales (n=7) asking them to provide a copy of any policy or guidance on the implementation of Section 5(4). Documents were analysed using content analysis. Specific attention was given to any deviations from the national Mental Health Act Codes of Practice.

In total, 41 (67.2 per cent) organisations had a policy on the implementation of Section 5(4). There was a high level of consistency between local guidance and the Mental Health Act Codes of Practice. There were however; different interpretations of the guidance and errors that could lead to misuse of the section. Some policies contained useful guidance that could be adopted by future versions of the national Codes of Practice.

The research has demonstrated the value of examining the relationship between national and local guidance. Further research should be undertaken on the frequency and reasons for any reuse of the section.

Greater attention should be given to considering the necessity of local policy, given the existence of national Codes of Practice.

This is the only research examining the policy framework for the implementation of Section 5(4).

Both investors and the stock markets are believed to behave in a perfectly rational manner, where investors focus on utility maximization and are not subjected to cognitive biases or any information processing errors. However, it has been discovered that the sentiment of the social mood has a significant impact on the stock market. This study aims to analyze how did the protest event of Tesla happened in April 2021 have a significant effect on the company's stock performance as well as its competitors, Nio, under the competitive effect.

The research is based on time series data collected from Tesla and Nio by employing 10 days, 15 days and 20 days anticipation and adjustment period for the event study. This study employed a text sentiment analysis to identify the polarity of the sentiment of the protest event using the Microsoft Azure machine learning tool which utilizes MPQA subjective lexicon.

The findings provide further evidence to show that a company-specific negative event has deteriorating effects on its stock performance, while having an opposite effect on its competitors.

The paper argues that negative sentiments through social media word of mouth (SWOM) affect the stock market not just in the short run but potentially in the longer run. Such negative sentiments might create a snowball effect which causes the market to further scrutinize a company's operations and possibly lose confidence in the company.

This study explores how the Tesla's protest event at Shanghai Auto Show 2021 has a significant impact on Tesla's stock performance and prolonged negative impact although Tesla implemented immediate remedial actions. The remedial actions were not accepted positively and induced a wave of negative news which had a more persistent effect.