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This paper aims to develop a compound measure, which is fiscal vulnerability index, provides early warning signals of fiscal sustainability problems for Türkiye's economy.

The index is constructed using twelve distinct fiscal indicators and applying the portfolio method, which considers the time-varying cross-correlation structure between the subindices.

Dynamics of the fiscal vulnerability index indicate that it accurately predicts to the well-known fiscal crisis occurring in Türkiye's recent history. As a result, such a compound measure should be used in the early identification of fiscal vulnerability in Türkiye.

The main contribution of this paper, relative to existing papers, is that a fiscal vulnerability index was constructed by employing the most contemporaneous method and evaluating its performance in terms of capturing historical stress periods.

While some countries have used debt to drive economic growth, the asymmetric effect on sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries has received little attention in the empirical literature. This paper therefore examines the asymmetric effect of external debts on economic growth.

The panel nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) approach was employed in the study for 29 sub-Saharan African countries from 1990 to 2021. The cross-sectional dependence test was used to determine the presence of cross-sectional dependence, while the second-generation panel unit root tests was used to examine the unit-root properties.

The empirical results show that external debt has an asymmetric effect on economic growth in both the short and long run. In the long run, a positive shock in external debts of 1% triggers an upturn in economic growth by 0.216% while a negative shock triggers 0.354% decline in economic growth. This implies that the negative shock of external debts has a much stronger impact on economic growth than the positive shock. In the short run, a positive shock in external debts by 1% triggers a decline in economic growth by 0.641%, while a negative shock of 1% triggers a fall in economic growth of 0.170%.

The paper used the NARDL model to examine the asymmetric impact of external debt on the economic growth of SSA countries, which has not been extensively studied. It is recommended that governments in the selected countries in sub-Saharan Africa should drive economic growth by promoting domestic revenue mobilization since external debts impede economic growth.

This study assessed the role of political institutions in the relationship between economic institutions and public debt in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Based on data availability, the study was done for 40 Sub-Saharan African countries from 2010 to 2019 employing generalized method of moment.

The authors documented a negative and significant relationship between economic institutions and public debt as well as a negative and significant effect of political institutions on public debt in SSA. Also, the study recorded that political institutions play a negative and significant role in the economic institutions-public debt nexus in Sub-Saharan Africa. However, a threshold of 3.691 is given when it comes to the role of political institutions in the association between government spending and public debt nexus in SSA.

The authors failed to take certain indicators of economic institutions, such as freedom to trade internationally, the size of government and legal system and property into consideration.

The authors suggest that democracy is necessary for boosting economic institutions-induced public debt reduction in SSA.

The novelty of this study is evident in two ways: first, the authors assessed the relationship between economic institutions and public debt in SSA using novel measures such as government integrity, tax burden and government spending from the Heritage Foundation instead of traditional institution measures from World Governance Indicators used by earlier studies. The authors further contribute to literature by being the first to consider the foundational role of political institutions in employing economic institutions to fight high public debt in SSA. Again, the authors included the threshold at which political institutions can cause economic institutions to have a desired impact on public debt in SSA.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the Ottoman Empire’s net interest payments and foreign debt were sustainable or not in terms of their burden on budget revenues, using the method of historical econometric analysis.

In this study, the period between 1847 and 1882 of the Ottoman Empire is analyzed for sustainability analysis. Within the framework of the study, unit root tests and econometric analysis methods frequently used in the literature were used to analyze the sustainability of public debt. In the econometric analysis, in addition to various unit root tests, current econometric analysis methods, in particular Fourier expansion, were also used.

The results of econometric analyses showed that the burden of interest payments and foreign debt on the budget of the Ottoman state was unsustainable. This situation clearly shows the reason for the official bankruptcy of the Ottoman Empire, which was declared in 1875.

Although this study reveals the bankruptcy process of an important structure such as the Ottoman Empire in the historical process through econometric analyses, it also gives a very important message to today’s states. Accordingly, today’s state policies and decision-making mechanisms should take these results into account and strive to make the burden of public interest payments sustainable. It is believed that the study will shed light on the public finance policies of today’s states by drawing lessons from the collapse process of the Ottoman state.

Unlike the historical assessments in the literature on the decline of the Ottoman Empire, this study presents a cliometric approach by applying current econometric analysis techniques to past historical data. The study explains the unsustainability of the Ottoman Empire’s interest payments and external debt burden in the period under consideration in a way that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, has not been done before.

Public debt forecasts represent a key policy issue. Many methodologies have been employed to predict debt sustainability, including dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models, the stock flow consistent method, the structural vector autoregressive model and, more recently, the neuro-fuzzy method. Despite their widespread application in the empirical literature, all of these approaches exhibit shortcomings that limit their utility. The present research adopts a different approach to public debt forecasts, that is, the random forest, an ensemble of machine learning.

Using quarterly observations over the period 2000–2021, the present research tests the reliability of the random forest technique for forecasting the Italian public debt.

The results show the large predictive power of this method to forecast debt-to-GDP fluctuations, with no need to model the underlying structure of the economy.

Compared to other methodologies, the random forest method has a predictive capacity that is granted by the algorithm itself. The use of repeated learning, training and validation stages provides well-defined parameters that are not conditional to strong theoretical restrictions This allows to overcome the shortcomings arising from the traditional techniques which are generally adopted in the empirical literature to forecast public debt.

The study attempts to examine the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the economic growth and public debt of the Indian economy. The authors also attempt to make quarterly projections of economic growth and external debt (ED) for the next five years. The objective is to understand how much time the economy takes to recover and at what pace. Consequently, this study elucidates the composition of debt after the crisis in the next five years.

To predict India's gross domestic product (GDP) and ED for the next five years, the authors used an auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model. This model was built under a Box–Jenkins methodology (Box and Jenkins, 1976) and was subjected to an augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) test to check the stationarity of the data. The methodology includes three main steps to estimate and forecast the model: identification, estimation, and diagnostic and forecasting.

The study finds that the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has significant implications for economic growth and public debt. The economy faced contraction in the first quarter of the year 2020 due to the suspension of economic activities and still struggling with the negative values of GDP. The forecasting results reveal that ED will continue to grow to meet the increasing health expenditure needs, and GDP will also bounce back slowly after the end of the year 2021. It has been noticed that the recurrent crisis derails the developing economies from the path of sustainable development to a prolonged economic slump with mounting public debt.

The study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on economic growth and public debt with particular reference to India. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first time the quarterly projections for GDP and ED have been made after the COVID-19 crisis.

This study aims to explore the determinants of public debt in selected South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries for 19 years, from 2001 to 2019.

Using ordinary fixed and random effect models, the authors examine the role of internal and external factors in determining the composition of public debt. Furthermore, for robustness, they compare the results with two-stage least square (2SLS) regression estimates after considering the problem of endogeneity, overidentification, under-identification and weak instruments.

The findings show that among the selected macroeconomic variables, inflation, exchange rate and broad money have significant negative effects on the debt-GDP ratio. In contrast, military spending, corruption and interest rates appear to positively influence the same as per 2SLS results. From the policymaking perspective, SAARC countries should focus more on reducing military spending and make a concerted effort to augment investments in productive projects. Further, with strong fiscal consolidation and institutional quality, it is important to mitigate the frequent occurrence of corruption conundrums in emerging economies for the development of a transparent economic system.

The study is distinct from previous studies in two ways. First, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are no studies focusing on SAARC countries in the context of public debt. Second, the study expands the existing literature on public debt by taking into account both external and internal debts to decipher the within-country and cross-country determinants of debt accumulation. More specifically, this model considers accountability and transparency in the public sector, cross-border security challenges and benefits of globalization by including explanatory variables such as corruption, military expenditure spending and capital inflows.

This study reexamines fiscal deficit sustainability in South Africa.

The study applies three cointegration testing approaches, namely testing for multiple structural changes in a cointegrated regression model, time-varying cointegration test and asymmetric cointegration test.

The results point to the existence of a level relationship between government revenue and spending. In addition, the long-run equilibrium relationship between government revenue and spending in South Africa is found to be characterized by breaks. As such, assuming a constant cointegrating slope may be misleading. Results from time-varying cointegration and an estimation of a cointegrated two-break model indicate that cointegrating coefficient has been time-varying but has remained less than 1 for the entire study period, indicating that fiscal deficits have been weakly sustainable. This finding is also confirmed by the results from an estimated asymmetric error correction model.

In view of the findings, authorities should put in place policies to improve the fiscal budgetary stance and reinforce the sustainability of the fiscal deficits in South Africa. Among other things, South Africa could undertake reforms to state-owned companies to reduce their reliance on public funds, slow down the pace of the public sector wage growth and devise effective economic measures to boost long-term growth. In addition, tax compliance and other revenue collection measures should be enhanced for additional tax revenue.

The contribution of this study is twofold; first, the study uses a long series of annual data spanning over a century, from 1913 to 2020. Indeed, cointegration is better modeled using long spans of time series data. Second, to examine the existence of a level relationship between spending and revenue, the study uses cointegration tests which allow capturing time-variation in the cointegrating slope coefficient, and accounting for asymmetries in the relationship between government spending and revenue. It is important to allow for time-variation in the cointegrating slope coefficient, especially when it has been hardly treated in the empirical literature on fiscal deficit sustainability. Allowing for time-variation in the cointegrating slope coefficient helps us to analyze fiscal deficit sustainability by periods of time. Indeed, the degree of fiscal sustainability can change from one time period to another.

This paper aims to examine the extent to which these reforms address the limitations of Saudi Arabia’s previous investment framework. Long viewed as a hostile environment in which to do business, the Saudi Government has enacted a broad sweep of measures aimed at restoring investor confidence in central aspects of the country’s evolving private law framework.

This paper offers a timely assessment of the raft of foreign investment reforms, both legislative and regulatory, that have been introduced in Saudi Arabia over the last decade.

The paper will proceed by outlining the perceived failings of the old investment regime before going on to reforms.

It will consider the remaining obstacles to the flow of foreign investment in Saudi Arabia in the context of the dual forces that have historically defined the Kingdom’s ambivalent investment law regime.

This study aims to investigate how the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Chinese outward foreign direct investments (FDI) impact the Belt and Road countries (BRCs). It draws on postcolonial theory to investigate the (geo)political objectives behind the financial and economic means.

In line with the nature of postcolonial studies, the study applies a discourse analysis integrating it with empirical data on indebtedness and trade.

This study finds that FDI and the BRI, as a development project, need to be considered a double-edged sword for the receiving countries. The authors provide evidence that China has instrumentalized financial and economic means to gain political influence and pursue geopolitical ambitions. Moreover, investments into sensitive sectors (e.g. energy, infrastructure), combined with the BRCs’ inability to pay back loans, could eventually lead to China gaining control of these assets.

The study investigates the financial and economic means that are instrumentalized to gain political influence while not considering flows of technology and know-how. It also limits itself to the study of FDI coming from one specific country, i.e. China. Therefore, no comparison and evaluation are made of FDI from other countries, such as the USA or European countries.

By revealing noncommercial objectives and geopolitical ambitions that China pursues through the BRI, the authors derive policy implications for the BRCs, third countries and China.

The study contributes to postcolonial theory and neocolonialism by investigating how China uses financial and economic means to achieve noncommercial objectives and pursue geopolitical ambitions. Additionally, the authors enhance the understanding of FDI by highlighting more subtle aspects of the complex and contextual nature of FDI as a social phenomenon, which have been overlooked thus far. The authors challenge the predominant positive framing of FDI and provide a counterpoint to the way FDI is often coined.