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COVID-19 has affected the economies adversely from all sides. The sudden halt in production has impacted both the supply and demand sides. It calls for analysis to quantify the impact of the reduction in economic activity on the economy-wide variables so that appropriate steps can be taken. This study aims to evaluate the sensitivity of various sectors of the Indian economy to this dual shock.

The eight-sector open economy general equilibrium Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) model has been simulated to evaluate the sector-specific effects of a fall in economic activity due to COVID-19. This model uses an economy-wide accounting framework to quantify the impact of a shock on the given equilibrium economy and report the post-simulation new equilibrium values.

The empirical results state that welfare for the Indian economy falls to the tune of 7.70% due to output shock. Because of demand–supply linkages, it also impacts the inter- and intra-industry flows, demand for factors of production and imports. There is a momentous fall in the demand for factor endowments from all sectors. Among those, the trade-hotel-transport and manufacturing sectors are in the first two positions from the top. The study recommends an immediate revival of the manufacturing and trade-hotel-transport sectors to get the Indian economy back on track.

The present study has modified the existing GTAP model accounting framework through unemployment and output closures to account for the impact of change in sectoral output due to COVID-19 on the level of employment and other macroeconomic variables.

In this paper, the heterogeneity of the linkages among financial development, productivity and growth across income groups is emphasized.

An empirical analysis is conducted with an illustrative sample of 130 economies over the period 1991–2019 and classified into four subsamples: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), developing, least developed and net food importing developing countries. Forecast error variance decompositions and panel vector auto-regressive estimations are computed, with insightful findings.

Higher levels of output stimulate the economic development in the agricultural sector, mainly via the productivity channel and, in the most developed economies, also through access to credit. Differently, in developing and least developed economies, the role of access to credit is marginal. The findings have practical implications for stakeholders involved in the planning of long-run investments. In less developed economies, priorities should be given to investments in technology and innovation, whereas financial markets are more suited to boost the development of the agricultural sector of developed economies.

The authors conclude on the credit–output–productivity nexus and contribute to the literature in (at least) three ways. First, they assess how credit access, agricultural output and agricultural productivity are jointly determined. Second, they use a novel approach, which departs from most of the case studies based on single-country data. Third, they conclude on potential causality links to conclude on policy implications.

Emerging economies have been highlighted as an important growth source of the global economy. However, this group of countries has not received enough academic attention yet. Therefore, this study aims to identify the impact of research and development (R&D) expenditure on economic growth in emerging economies.

The theoretical framework of the production function is applied to quantitatively analyse the impact of R&D expenditure on economic growth with a sample of 29 emerging economies in the period between 1996 and 2019.

The panel cointegration test confirms the existence of long-run cointegration relationships between economic growth and independent variables in these emerging economies. Besides, the estimated results show that the national R&D expenditure has positive effects on economic growth from both direct and interaction dimensions. This evidence has filled the empirical research gap in the R&D-growth nexus in the case of emerging economies. Finally, while gross capital and education have positive impacts on growth, corruption has a harmful effect on economic growth in these countries.

The results highlight that policymakers should enhance R&D expenditure and R&D activities as the key national development strategy. The investment in R&D not only helps emerging economies avoid the middle-income trap but also pushes these countries to successfully join the group of developed countries.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is among the first to examine the impact of R&D expenditure on economic growth with a homogeneous sample of emerging economies. The results are obviously helpful for policymakers to use R&D as the key development strategy for supporting economic growth in emerging economies in the future.

This chapter aims to discuss the challenges facing these countries building productive capacity for development. This chapter makes use of data published by international organizations as indicators for measuring the state of development in the Arab region. Several indicators are presented to compare Arab countries with other world regions. The use of data identifies some of the gaps that countries in the Arab region need to close to strengthen capacity building for development and fostering economic growth. The findings from the data presented reveal that the productive structure in most Arab countries remains weak to generate production linkages and provide incentives for investment in nonenergy sectors. The failure of the export-led growth model to diversify output and promote development in energy producing countries has increased the dependence of these countries on global trade. Fluctuations in commodity prices and uncertainty about global demand for energy have influenced the ability of the state to construct strategies for rapid transformation. Except for the energy sector, the productivity of nonoil sectors remains low reflecting inadequate incentives and ineffective entrepreneurial capabilities. The study examines the challenges for building productive capacity in the Arab world. It illustrates the failure of the led-export model and its inability to prompted economic diversification, especially in the Gulf countries. The study contributes to the literature on capacity building in the Arab world so that to encourage researchers and students of development conducting studies concerning the main development challenges facing these countries.

Education had proven to be one of the main determinants of economic growth, and it is a reason of the variations in economic growth levels between developed and developing countries. One of the main dimensions in studding the relationship between economic growth and education is the gender dimension or the importance of gender equality or female education in achieving economic growth. This chapter aims to test the hypothesis of the existence of a positive relationship between female education and economic growth in Egypt since 1990.

To address this question, Auto Regression Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bound test approach is conducted to analyze the co-integration between female education and economic growth using Egyptian Data for the period 1990–2022. The Empirical analysis for Egypt suggests the existence of positive significant relationship both in the short run and long run and that the impact of female education on economic growth is larger than the impact of education in general on growth. This could be explained by the existence of gender gap in Egypt, labor market, and thus, more educated girls able to enter the labor market will affect the economic growth more than the education of both sexes, in other words, there is still a room for improvement in the female labor market opportunities than for both sexes. The chapter also confirms the existence of a direct link between education in general and economic growth and thus confirms the hypothesis of the positive impact of education economic growth.

The purpose of this study is to provide new insights into the relationship between fiscal policy and total factor productivity (TFP) while accounting for several economic and econometric issues of the phenomenon like non-stationarity, fiscal feedback effects, persistence in productivity, country heterogeneity and unobserved global shocks and local spillovers affecting heterogeneously the countries in the sample.

The paper is empirical. It builds an Error Correction Model (ECM) specification within a dynamic heterogeneous framework with common correlated effects and models both reverse causality and feedback effects.

The results of this study highlight some new findings relative to the existing related literature. The outcomes suggest some relevant evidence at both the academic and policy levels: (1) the causal effects going from fiscal deficit/surplus to TFP are heterogeneous across countries; (2) the effects depend on the time horizon considered; (3) the long-run dynamics of TFP are positively impacted by improvements in fiscal budget, but only if the austerity measures do not exert slowdowns in aggregate growth.

The main originality of this study is methodological, with possible extensions to related phenomena. Relative to the existing literature, the gains of this study rely on the way econometric techniques, recently proposed in the literature, are adapted to the economic relationship of interest. The endogeneity due to the existence of reverse causality is modelled without implying relevant performance losses of the models. Moreover, this is the first article that questions whether the effects of fiscal budget on productivity depend on the impact of the former on aggregate output growth, thus emphasising the importance of the quality of fiscal adjustments.

For close to two decades, the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) has been preparing to launch a second monetary union within the ECOWAS region. This study aims to determine the impact such a unionised monetary regime will have on financial stability as represented by the nonperforming loan ratios of Ghana in a counterfactual framework.

This study models nonperforming loan ratios as dependent on the monetary policy rate and the business cycle. The study then used historical data to estimate the parameters of the nonperforming loan ratio response function using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. The estimated parameters are further used to estimate the impact of several counterfactual unionised monetary policy rates on the nonperforming loan ratios and its volatility of Ghana. As robustness check, the Least Absolute Shrinkage Selection Operator (LASSO) regression is also used to estimate the nonperforming loan ratios response function and to predict nonperforming loans under the counterfactual unionised monetary policy rates.

The results of the counterfactual study reveals that the apparent cost of monetary unification is much less than supposed with a monetary union likely to dampen volatility in non-performing loans in Ghana. As such, the WAMZ members should increase the pace towards monetary unification.

The paper contributes to the existing literature by explicitly modelling nonperforming loan ratios as dependent on monetary policy and the business cycle. The study also settles the debate on the financial stability cost of a monetary union due to the nonalignment of business cycles and economic structures.

The paper aims at addressing the following research questions: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency? And which pillars of institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

By specifying a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method where GHG emissions are considered as the bad output and the GDP is referred as the desirable one, the work computes the environmental efficiency into the appraisal of a production function for the European countries over three decades.

According to the countries' performance, the findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries. In this environmental context, the role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries.

This article attempts to analyze the role of different dimensions of institutional quality in different European countries' performance – in terms of mitigating GHGs (undesirable output) – while trying to raise their economic performance through their GDP (desirable output).

1. The paper aims at addressing the following research question: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

2. We adopt a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method, considering 40 European economies over a 30-year time interval.

3. The findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries.

4. The role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries, while the performance decreases for the low middle-income countries.

The paper aims at addressing the following research question: does institutional quality improve countries' environmental efficiency?

We adopt a directional distance function in the context of stochastic frontier method, considering 40 European economies over a 30-year time interval.

The findings confirm that high and upper middle-income countries have higher environmental efficiency compared to low middle-income countries.

The role of institutional quality turns out to be really important in improving the environmental efficiency for high income countries, while the performance decreases for the low middle-income countries.

The study aims to estimate the short- and long-run effects of monetary policy on residential property prices in South Africa. Over the past decades, there has been a monetary policy shift, from targeting money supply and exchange rate to inflation. The shifts have affected residential property market dynamics.

The Johansen cointegration approach was used to estimate the effects of changes in monetary policy proxies on residential property prices using quarterly data from 1980 to 2022.

Mortgage finance and economic growth have a significant positive long-run effect on residential property prices. The consumer price index, the inflation targeting framework, interest rates and exchange rates have a significant negative long-run effect on residential property prices. The Granger causality test has depicted that exchange rate significantly influences residential property prices in the short run, and interest rates, inflation targeting framework, gross domestic product, money supply consumer price index and exchange rate can quickly return to equilibrium when they are in disequilibrium.

There are limited arguments whether the inflation targeting monetary policy framework in South Africa has prevented residential property market boom and bust scenarios. The study has found that the implementation of inflation targeting framework has successfully reduced booms in residential property prices in South Africa.

Output from the Irish Dairy Industry has grown rapidly since the abolition of quotas in 2015, with processors investing heavily in capacity expansion to deal with the extra milk volumes. Further capacity gains may be achieved by extending the processing season into the winter, a key enabler for which being the reduction of duration of the winter maintenance overhaul period. This paper aims to investigate if Lean Six Sigma tools and techniques can be used to enhance operational maintenance performance, thereby releasing additional processing capacity.

Combining the Six-Sigma Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control (DMAIC) methodology and the structured approach of Turnaround Maintenance (TAM) widely used in process industries creates a novel hybrid model that promises substantial improvement in maintenance overhaul execution. This paper presents a case study applying the DMAIC/TAM model to Ireland’s largest dairy processing site to optimise the annual maintenance shutdown. The objective was to deliver a 30% reduction in the duration of the overhaul, enabling an extension of the processing season.

Application of the DMAIC/TAM hybrid resulted in process enhancements, employee engagement and a clear roadmap for the operations team. Project goals were delivered, and original objectives exceeded, resulting in €8.9m additional value to the business and a reduction of 36% in the duration of the overhaul.

The results demonstrate that the model provides a structure that promotes systematic working and a continuous improvement focus that can have substantial benefits for wider industry. Opportunities for further model refinement were identified and will enhance performance in subsequent overhauls.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time that the structure and tools of DMAIC and TAM have been combined into a hybrid methodology and applied in an Irish industrial setting.