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This study aims to investigate the factors that affect the likelihood of formalizing informal sector activities in 13 Sub-Saharan African countries, using World Bank enterprise survey data collected between the periods 2009 and 2018. Notwithstanding the great contribution of the informal economy in Africa, developing countries may stand to gain more if they make inroads in formalizing the informal sector.

Since the dependent variable is binary taking the value of one if the firm is willing to formalize and zero otherwise, the study will employ a discrete choice probit model.

Results inter alia show that firms that are more likely to formalize are young, owned by individuals with high levels of education and, have registered before. Governments should therefore target firms that are young and provide them with information about the benefits of registration, and if these firms are owned by experienced and educated individuals, the likelihood for them to register would be high.

The study uses cross sectional data and therefore cannot capture time variant factors affecting the probability to register and also cannot correct effectively for endogeneity.

Governments should therefore target firms that are young and provide them with as much information as possible about the benefits of registration, and if these firms are owned by experienced and educated individuals, the likelihood to convince them to register would be high. They should also reduce the cost of registration so as to improve net benefits in line with the rational exit view.

Formalizing informal activities will help improve the performance of these firms, reduce vulnerable employment as well as crime, poverty and inequality. Providing decent operating and working conditions to informal players will reduce social and political unrest.

The African continent is home to many informal firms accounting for roughly 55% of economic activity with 90% of workers eking out a living in a sector that does not respect worker rights, provide decent working conditions and where changes in growth have done little to reduce its size. Regulatory reforms have also been implemented resulting in the number of start-up registration procedures falling from 11 in 2003 to seven in 2019. The uniqueness of Sub Saharan Africa in terms of entrepreneurial culture, political, institutional and economic conditions as well as lack of consensus in the extant empirical literature make this study pertinent.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of corporate governance (CG) on intellectual capital efficiency (ICE) in Islamic banks (IBs) of Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries.

A sample of 129 IBs is drawn from the 29 OIC countries from 2008 to 2017. A two-step system of the generalised method of moments has been employed to account for the unobserved endogeneity and heteroscedasticity issue that arose due to time-variant and time-invariant variables.

The results revealed that CG measures, namely board size, non-executive directors do explain the extent and quality of ICE in the expected direction. In contrast, CEO duality, Shariah board and audit committee are negatively associated with the ICE. Moreover, the authors observed that male CEO in IBs has negative, but foreign ownership has a positive association with ICE in determining the extent of ICE in IBs. This study contributes specifically to the stakeholder theory and the literature of ICE and CG.

The findings of the study provide insight into how a larger board can overcome skill deficiency and how making more investment in ICE would help to enhance productivity. Hence, bank managers, regulators, policymakers and shareholders have strong interest in designing the appropriate CG structure to develop ICE in banks.

This is one of the few studies which provide empirical evidence of CG mechanism to boost the ICE in the perspective of IBs of the OIC countries.

In this study, we examine whether work from home (WFH) had an impact on firm productivity during the COVID-19 period.

We employ a panel fixed-effect model using 79,201 firm-quarter observations in a cross-country setting of 68 countries.

First, we find that firms that employed WFH contributed to real sector growth during the pandemic due to greater capital expenditure compared to otherwise. Second, we find that WFH amenable firms turned over assets better than less WFH amenable firms.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to examine the impact of WFH on firms’ investment and efficiency using a cross-country setting.

This paper aims to model the efficiency of labour offices belonging to the public employment services (PESs) in Spain using a stochastic matching frontier approach.

With this aim in mind, the authors apply a random parameter model approach to control for observed and unobserved heterogeneity.

Results indicate that when the information criteria of the estimates are analysed, it improves by controlling both, observed and unobserved heterogeneity in the inefficiency term. Also, results suggest that counsellors improve the productivity of labour offices and that the share of unemployed skilled persons, unemployed persons aged 44 or younger, as well as the share of unemployed persons in the construction sector, all affect the technical efficiency of PESs offices.

The model extends the previous specifications in the matching literature that capture only observed heterogeneity. Moreover, as far as the authors know, it is the first paper that estimates a matching frontier for the Spanish case. Finally, the database they use is at the office level and includes the work carried out by counsellors, which is a novelty in the analysis of this type of studies at the Spanish level.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the problem of fiscal sustainability for a panel of developing Asian economies.

In this study, cross-section dependence and heterogeneity are controlled while estimating the fiscal reaction function, which shows how governments react to the accumulation of public debt. The study employs the common correlated effects mean group estimator in Pesaran (2006) for a panel of 22 developing Asian economies for the period 1999‒2017.

It is found that the fiscal sustainability issue in the region is not so benign as in previous studies. Overall, fiscal policy is unsustainable, even for the nonlinear fiscal rule. Country-specific long-run coefficients are also examined in the study.

The findings show that many developing economies in the region could not satisfy the intertemporal budget constraint, which raises concerns about debt sustainability in the area, especially for the post-crisis period.

This study investigates whether governments can maintain the sustainability of public finances in the long-run, if the ratios of public debt over GDP and primary deficit over GDP continue their recent problematic trends. Another novelty is controlling for heterogeneous effects among the countries in the region to give a more precise picture of debt sustainability. The empirical evidence also supports that insolvency risk can occur at low levels of public debt.

This paper aims to analyze the dynamics of the Spanish public debt–gross domestic product ratio during the period 1850–2020.

This study uses a recent procedure to test for recurrent explosive behavior (Phillips et al., 2011; Phillips et al., 2015a, 2015b) to identify episodes of explosive public debt dynamics and also the episodes of fiscal adjustments over this long period.

The identified episodes of explosive behavior of public debt coincided with fiscal stress events, whereas fiscal adjustments and changes in economic policies stabilized public finances after periods of explosive dynamics of public debt.

The longer than usual span of the data should allow the authors to obtain some more robust results than in most of previous analyses of long-run sustainability.

Dynamic lot sizing is the problem of determining the quantity and timing of ordering items while satisfying the demand over a finite planning horizon. This paper considers the problem with two practical considerations: minimum order size and lost sales. The minimum order size is the minimum amount of items that should be purchased and lost sales involve situations in which sales are lost because items are not on hand or when it becomes more economical to lose the sale rather than making the sale. The objective is to minimize the costs of ordering, item , inventory holding and lost sale over the planning horizon. To solve the problem, we suggest a heuristic algorithm by considering trade-offs between cost factors. Computational experiments on randomly generated test instances show that the algorithm quickly obtains near-optimal solutions.

This study aims to compare linear programming and stable marriage approaches to the personnel assignment problem under conditions of uncertainty. Robust solutions should exhibit reduced variability of solutions in the presence of one or more additional constraints or problem perturbations added to some baseline problems.

Several variations of each approach are compared with respect to solution speed, solution quality as measured by officer-to-assignment preferences and solution robustness as measured by the number of assignment changes required after inducing a set of representative perturbations or constraints to an assignment instance. These side constraints represent the realistic assignment categorical priorities and limitations encountered by army assignment managers who solve this problem semiannually, and thus the synthetic instances considered herein emulate typical problem instances.

The results provide insight regarding the trade-offs between traditional optimization and heuristic-based solution approaches.

The results indicate the viability of using the stable marriage algorithm for talent management via the talent marketplace currently used by both the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force for personnel assignments.

With the recognition that generating economic growth is not the same as sustaining it, the challenge to catch-up and growth literature is discerning between these processes. Recent research suggests that the decline in the frequency of “shrinking” episodes is more important for long-term development than higher growth rates. By using a framework centred around social capabilities, this study aims to investigate the effects of income inequality and poverty on economic shrinking frequency, as opposed to previous literature that has exclusively had a growth focus. The aim is to investigate how and why some societies might be more resilient to economic shrinking.

The research is a quantitative study, and the authors build a longitudinal data set including 23 developing countries throughout 42 years to test the paper’s purpose. This study uses country and period fixed-effects specifications as well as cross-sectional graphical representations to investigate the relationship between proxies of economic inclusivity and the frequency of shrinking episodes.

The authors demonstrate that while inclusive societies are more resilient to shrinking overall, it is changes in poverty levels, but not changes in income inequality, that appear to be correlated with economic shrinking frequency. Inequality, while still an important element to explain countries’ growth potential as an initial condition, does not seem to make the sample more resilient to shrinking. The authors conclude that the mechanisms in which poverty and inequality are correlated with the catch-up process must run through different channels. Ultimately, processes that explain growth may intersect but not always overlap with the ones that explain resilience to shrinking.

The need for inclusive growth in long-term development has been championed for decades, yet inclusion has seldom been explored from the shrinking perspective. Though poverty reduction is already an important mainstream political objective, this paper differentiates itself by providing an alternate viewpoint of why this is important. Income inequality could have more of an economic growth limiting effect, while poverty reduction could be required to build resilience to economic shrinking. Developing countries will need both growth and resilience to shrinking, to catch-up with higher-income economies, which policymakers might need to balance carefully.