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The paper reviews existing literature on South Asian ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction (DRR) and identifies how community participation can be used to plan and implement ecosystem-based DRR approaches.

The literature review methodology involved several stages. Firstly, the research objective was determined. Secondly keywords for the literature search were determined. Scopus, Google Scholar, JSTOR and AUT online library were utilized for the literature search. After the search, the literature was screened. The study design, methodology, results and limitations were identified and documented. After data extraction, the literature was analyzed. The patterns, trends and inconsistencies in the literature were identified based on the research question. Later the gaps, controversies and future research needs were identified. Then, a comprehensive and structured literature review that summarizes the relevant literature, synthesizes the findings and provides a critical evaluation of the literature was documented. After writing the document, it was reviewed and edited to ensure its clarity, accuracy and coherence.

The paper identifies four different themes recurrently emerging in literature on the importance of community participation in ecosystem-based DRR in South Asia. The themes are local community participation in ecosystem-based DRR governance, knowledge production, livelihood enhancement and increased public acceptance.

The paper also illustrates the challenges in integrating community participation with the dominant physical scientific approaches ecosystem-based DRR and proposes a five-element framework to facilitate the integration.

This study aims to examine the triple relationship between capital regulation, banking lending and economic growth in a dual markets. Specifically, the author seeks to explore how changes in capital regulation can impact banking lending practices and subsequently influence economic growth, while also investigating the reciprocal effects of banking lending on economic growth.

The author follows several previous studies such as Shrieves and Dahl (1992), Beck and Levine (2002), Altunbas et al. (2007), Saeed et al. (2020) and Stewart et al. (2021) to identify a system of three equations, regarding economic growth, capital and banking financing growth, respectively. The author estimates the parameters of all equations simultaneously using the seemingly unrelated regression method (Zellner, 1962) for a sample of 46 Islamic banks and 113 conventional banks during 2002–2022. These banks operate in 13 Muslim countries from Middle East and North Africa and Southeast Asia.

The author’s findings demonstrate that in the case of Islamic banking, an increase in loan growth stimulates economic growth, while an increasing capital ratio positively influences economic growth but is accompanied by a reduction in loan growth. This result corroborates the findings of Stewart et al. (2021), which indicate that regulatory capital reduces unstable credit while improving gross domestic product growth. However, in the case of conventional banks, the response to an increase in loan growth on Gross Domestic Product Per Capita Growth (GDPCG) is ambiguous, while the capital ratio improves GDPCG and promotes LOANG, which, in turn, increases risk.

The Islamic banks can continue to significantly contribute to economic growth by effectively directing their available capital toward viable investment opportunities and supporting sustainable financial practices, even in the presence of potential constraints on loan growth. As for conventional banks, they are invited to increase their capital levels to ensure a strong and resilient financial system that can support lending and facilitate economic growth.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper is the first to explore the triple relationship between capital requirements, Islamic bank lending and economic growth.

This study aims to investigate whether Bangladesh would avoid the middle-income trap (MIT) in its transition to a high-income country (HIC) according to its “Vision 2041”.

Using both actual and forecasted secondary data, three MIT models of different approaches were used to evaluate the government’s vision-based projections. Moreover, crucial indicators of deindustrialization and institutional strength were linked to the investigation of potential transitions.

According to the absolute definition and international forecasts, the Bangladesh economy might not fall into an MIT at its lower-middle-income level within the intended period due to being shorter than the defined limit. However, its real GDP per capita relative to the USA would remain far below the defined threshold limit of an upper-middle-income country (UMC) in 2041. Meanwhile, Bangladesh has reached the third of the five gradual phases and is awaiting a new transition in 2029. However, its vision-based plan would face challenges such as skills gaps, institutional reforms and successive global crises.

Bangladesh might be trapped in MIT at the UMC level in the 2030s, with no path to renovate after the demographic dividend ends in 2047. In this regard, the government must demonstrate a strong political will to ensure the effectiveness of its policies and the viability of its institutions.

This study not only compared projections to forecasts using different MIT models but also connected transition phases to industrial policies and institutional strengths.

This paper focuses on the relationship between the regulatory capital requirements and the supply of credit for commercial banks that are operating in the MENA region from 1999 till 2017.

The application of the Fixed Effects Model on a panel of commercial banks in the MENA region has shown a negative relationship between supply of credit and both the capital requirements and solvency ratios.

The results showed that the idiosyncratic, the macroeconomic and the institutional variables affect the supply of credit behavior of banks. The robustness tests using the Two-Stage Least Square method (2SLS) also led to a negative correlation between the growth of credit and capital requirements. Specific macroeconomic and institutional variables have revealed the expected sign and are significant regardless of the estimated specifications.

This work can be subjected to further future extensions. The explanatory power of our model can be improved by incorporating variables that reflect the corporate governance and structure of banking sector. Similarly, we can also include a variable that takes into account the increasing competition that could affect the stability of the banking sector and therefore the prudential banking regulation.

Previous studies that investigated only the relationship between capital level and risk-taking behavior of banks in the MENA region did not take into account neither the economic and institutional environment nor the impact of these regulations on credit (loans) supply.

The present study investigates the nexus between health performance dynamics and economic growth in 43 countries in sub-Saharan Africa for the period 2004–2018.

Four health performance dynamics are used, notably: total life expectancy, male life expectancy, female life expectancy and risk of maternal death. The empirical evidence is based on quantile regressions (QRs) in order to put into perspective the conditional distribution of economic growth.

The following findings are established: (1) total life expectancy and male life expectancy increase economic growth exclusively in the 10th and 90th quantiles of economic growth; (2) female life expectancy boosts economic growth in the 90th quantile of economic growth and (3) the risk of maternal death reduces economic growth in the 75th and 90th quantiles of economic growth. Policy implications are discussed.

The study complements the literature on the nexus between health performance and economic growth by assessing the nexuses throughout the conditional distribution of economic growth.

This study aims to empirically investigate the impact of political instability on the banking stability of the dual banking system in the Middle East and North African (MENA) countries.

The study measures banking stability with probability of default (PD) and Zscore by employing the generalised method of moment (GMM) between 2007 and 2021 on the dual banking system in the region. The authors further estimate short-long-run situations coupled with a robustness test using a generalised least square (GLS) model.

The authors' findings indicate that institutional factors of political stability, crisis period, high-crisis countries, law and order and macroeconomic indicators influence the two types of banking stability in the region. The authors found the consistency of the factors explaining stability in the region in both short-and long-run situations. Consequently, the study also reveals the adverse effects of crisis periods and high-crisis countries on banking stability.

The results of this study explicitly identify the critical need for sustaining political stability and abiding by laws and order to achieve dual banking stability in the region. Therefore, policymakers may consider allowing the region's banks to operate beyond retail banking since diversification enhances banking stability.

The authors' study balances by employing dual stability measurement in predicting the impact of political instability, law and order and other indicators on the MENA region's two banking models. This study uncovers the effect of the global crisis period on banking stability and high-crisis countries in the region and verifies the models' robustness.

The authors' work aims to identify the employer-specific drivers of the college (or university) wage gap, which has been identified as one of the major determinants of the dynamics of overall wage and income inequality in the past decades. The authors focus on three employer-level features that can be associated with asymmetries in the employment relation orientation adopted for college and non-college-educated employees: (1) size, (2) the share of standard employment and (3) the pervasiveness of incentive pay schemes.

The authors' establishment-level analysis (data from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), 2005–2018) focusses on Japan, an economy characterised by many unique economic and institutional features relevant to the aims of the authors' analysis. The authors use an adjusted measure of firm-specific college wage premium, which is not biased by confounding individual and establishment-level factors and reflects unobservable characteristics of employees that determine the payment of a premium. The authors' empirical methods account for the complexity of the relationships they investigate, and the authors test their baseline outcomes with econometric approaches (propensity score methods) able to address crucial identification issues related to endogeneity and reverse causality.

The authors' findings indicate that larger establishment size, a larger share of regular workers and more pervasive implementation of IPSs for college workers tend to increase the college wage gap once all observable workers, job and establishment characteristics are controlled for. This evidence corroborates the authors' hypotheses that a larger establishment size, a higher share of regular workers and a more developed set-up of performance pay schemes for college workers are associated with a better capacity of employers to attract and keep highly educated employees with unobservable characteristics that justify a wage premium above average market levels. The authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

The authors' contribution to the existing knowledge is threefold. First, the authors combine the economics and management/organisation literature to develop new insights that underpin the authors' testable empirical hypotheses. This enables the authors to shed light on employer-level drivers of wage differentials (size, workforce composition, implementation of performance-pay schemes) related to many structural, institutional and strategic dimensions. The second contribution lies in the authors' measure of the “adjusted” college wage gap, which is calculated on the component of individual wages that differs between observationally identical workers in the same establishment. As such, the metric captures unobservable workers' characteristics that can generate a wage premium/penalty. Third, the authors provide empirical evidence on how three relevant establishment-level characteristics shape the heterogeneity of the (adjusted) college wage observed across organisations.

Few empirical studies examined the relationship between life expectancy and income in India. This study aims to examine the impact of life expectancy on economic growth in India by incorporating all the major states of India.

This study is based on secondary data and includes 16 major states of India covering the periods 2000–2014. The author used panel fixed effect model (FEM) to examine the impact of life expectancy on economic growth.

Empirical analysis revealed a positive trend in life expectancy in India. In association with life expectancy, the author found continuous growth in the elderly population. The result of the FEM shows that gains in life expectancy positively affect economic growth in India. The empirical findings do not support any negative impact of life expectancy gains on economic growth.

This study is the outcome of the independent and original research work of the authors and contributes significantly to the literature on the demography–economic relationship. The findings of this study help the author to understand that life expectancy gain is in no way a constraint, rather the skill and experience of the workforce are crucial to determining economic growth.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-06-2022-0422.

This paper attempts to investigate the impact of the Russia–Ukraine war on the returns and volatility of the United States (US) natural gas futures market.

The study uses secondary data of 996 trading day provided by the US Department of Energy and investing.com websites and applies the event study methodology in addition to the generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (GARCH) family models.

The findings from the exponential EGARCH (1,1) estimate are the best indication of a significant positive effects of the Ukraine–Russia war on the returns and volatility of the US natural gas futures prices. The cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) of the event study show that the natural gas futures prices reacted negatively but not significantly to the Russian–Ukraine war at the event date window [−1,1] and the [−15, −4] event window. CARs for the longer pre and post-event window display significant positive values and coincides with the standard finance theory for the case of the US natural gas futures over the Russia–Ukraine conflict.

This is the first study to examine the impact of the Russia–Ukraine war on natural gas futures prices in the United States. Thus, it provides indications on the behavior of investors in this market and proposes new empirical evidence that help in investment analyses and decisions.

Serious concerns about the stability of the international financial systems have arisen recently, resulting from the mounting inflation rates and the accompanying procedures to control them. Consequently, this study aims at examining empirically the impact of inflationary pressures/shocks on the stability of banking sectors.

The study adopts a dynamic GMM models and exploits a sample of 188 banks operating in 14 MENA economies, over the period 1999–2021.

This research finds that high inflation does indeed harm bank financial stability and deteriorates banks credit risk. Furthermore, the examination of the impact of interaction terms between inflation and bank-specific and institutional quality variables shows that better capitalisation levels, higher liquidity buffers, larger asset size, greater market power, foreign ownership and overall political stability, all can counterbalance the impact of inflationary pressures on MENA banks financial stability.

In addition to empirically revealing how inflationary shocks can deteriorate financial stability, the main novelty of this research is examining how the interactions between inflation on one hand, and bank-specific and institutional quality on the other, affect bank stability.