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The chapter points to the interactive nature of the different aspects of sustainability of development and investigates the interrelations among the various facets of development or sustainability. It further makes deeper analysis of the dynamic relations among human development, the natural environment, and economic growth. Using simultaneous equation econometric models for 1990–2019 in a cross section of 110 countries, it observes that economic growth in terms of growth of per capita national income is important for both human development as well as for environmental conservation and protection. For environmental sustainability it is thus both growth policy and direct environmental policies relating to protecting human health and health of the ecosystem would be of prime importance.

The purpose of this paper is to revise, update and extend the economic vulnerability and economic resilience indices, where economic vulnerability is associated with inherent exposure to external shocks and economic resilience with policies that enable a country to minimize or withstand the negative effects of such shocks. This study also proposes a revised vulnerability/resilience framework to assess the risk of a country being harmed by external economic shocks.

The methodology used in the study involves defining economic vulnerability in terms of inherent features of an economy and defining economic resilience in terms of policy-induced changes, and then devising measureable indices to measure such vulnerability and resilience across countries. The exercise required the examination of various global indices to assess their suitability, in terms of relevance and country coverage, for measuring the vulnerability index and the resilience index and the components of the two indices.

The main finding of the study is that a number highly vulnerable states, including economically successful small island economies, emerged with high resilience scores, suggesting that they adopt policies that enable them to withstand the harmful effects of external shocks. This possibly explains why these states register relatively high GDP per capita, in spite of their high exposure to shocks. On the other hand, a number of countries, mostly large and poor developing countries, that are not highly exposed to external shocks due to their limited dependence on external trade, emerged with a low degree of policy-induced economic resilience.

The study utilized global indicators which sometimes had missing data and these had to be filled in using approximations based on assumptions, and alternative assumption could have produced a different approximations. In addition the classification of countries in terms of the vulnerability and resilience nexus depended highly on many underpinning assumptions, including the definitions and the measurement of the components, the weighting schemes and the thresholds used. It is likely that alternative assumptions would yield alternative classifications.

An important practical implication of this study is that highly economically vulnerable states can reduce the harmful effects of external economic shocks if they adopt policies that lead to resilience building. On the other hand, countries that are not highly exposed to external shocks, can render themselves economically unstable due to their weak economic, social and environmental governance.

This study considers social development and cohesion as one of the pillars of resilience building. The implication of this approach is that social governance, leading to improvements in the education and health of the population could reduce the harm arising from a country’s exposure to external shocks. This is because social governance affects the extent to which relations within a society are properly developed, enabling an effective functioning of the economic apparatus without the hindrance of civil unrest.

This study has extended previous work on the vulnerability and resilience framework, to include almost all countries of the world, using updated data, and has revised the resilience index to include environmental governance. It has also redefined market flexibility to allow for the downsides of excessive financial riskiness. The revision of vulnerability and resilience indices in the light of new data and their interaction showed more convincingly that economies that are highly economically vulnerable could still register economic success as a result of resilience-conducive policies associated with good economic, political, social and environmental governance.

Sequel to the results of the preceding chapter that depicted positive associations of credit with the indicators of growth and development, the present chapter aims at investigating the interrelationships of credit with GDP and HDI separately in a bivariate framework for the selected countries for the period 1990–2019. For this purpose, this chapter first develops a theoretical model in line with the Barro (1991) model where bank credit is introduced as a good institutional component of endogenous growth. Then, it goes for a time series exercise to establish the long-run relations and short-run dynamics for the pairs of variables, credit-GDP and credit-HDI, to justify the linkages between the financial sector and the real sector. The study arrives at mixed results across the countries. In many cases, credit has been identified to be strongly related to income and development indicators in the long run through cointegrated stable relationships. Furthermore, credit makes a causal influence on GDP and HDI in some developed countries whereas GDP becomes a causal factor to credit in some developing countries. It is thus recommended for further aggravation of the two sectors’ linkages under the patronisations of the governments and the monetary authorities of the countries to have high growth of income and development so that a part of the sustainable development goal can be achieved through the financial sector.

Past research has identified a negative association between national income and female entrepreneurship rates. Data from Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2012 are analyzed to determine whether the Human Development Index (HDI) predicts female entrepreneurship rates. The purpose of this paper is to indicate how other socioeconomic variables that measure human development interact with national income to predict female entrepreneurship rates.

Data were drawn from the 2012 GEM data set, which provides information on female entrepreneurship rates in 61 countries. To test relevant hypotheses, dependent and socio-demographic variables were sourced from international databases to perform quantitative cross-country regression analyses.

National income significantly predicted female entrepreneurship rates in the univariate analysis. However, this relationship became non-significant when development indices were added to the model. In contrast, the HDI, the Gender Inequality Index, and national religious composition were robust, significant predictors.

This study presents evidence that human and gender development indices, and national religious composition, are better predictors of female entrepreneurship rates than national income. Thus, studies on female entrepreneurship rates should account and adjust for human development and gender equality indices. As religiosity continues to be pervasive within multiple nations, policymakers should consider this when developing interventions geared toward promoting female entrepreneurship.

This paper identifies factors other than economic determinism to explain variance in female entrepreneurship rates and demonstrates that human development and gender inequality indices are better predictors of female entrepreneurship rates.

The human development index (HDI) and gender‐related development index (GDI) have become accepted as leading measures for ranking human well being in different countries. The purpose of this paper is to identify the planning policies that improve these indices and to also suggest modifications to the indices that yield more sensible policies.Design/methodology/approach – This paper solves the first‐best welfare problem in which the planner maximizes a development index subject to resource constraints.Findings – Planning strategies that maximize the HDI tend towards minimizing consumption and maximizing expenditures on education and health. Interestingly, such strategies also tend towards equitable allocations, even though inequality aversion is not modelled in the HDI. The paper shows that the GDI generates optimal plans with similar properties, and determine when the GDI and HDI generate consistent optimal plans. A problematic feature of the optimal plans is that the income component in the HDI (or GDI) does not play its intended role of securing resources for a decent standard of living. Rather, it acts to distort the allocation between health and education expenditure. The paper argues that it is better to drop income from the index. Alternatively, the paper considers net income, income net of education and health expenditures, as indicating capabilities not already reflected in the index. Finally, it compares how the modified indices and the HDI rank countries.Originality/value – The paper is believed to be the first to integrate development indices into national development planning.

With the growth of income at the global level, the World Bank data show that there are rising levels of income disparity across countries, groups, regions and within the countries. This fact otherwise hints at the inter-country divergence in incomes, particularly between the developed and developing countries of the world. This chapter, therefore, attempts to examine the convergence or divergence in credit, GDP and HDI across the 10 selected countries for the period of 1990–2019 applying the neoclassical growth approach and the time series approach. The results of the exercise in line with the neoclassical theories on absolute convergence and sigma convergence show that the countries are unquestionably converging in GDP and HDI with mixed results in case of credit. The results of convergence in GDP and HDI in all the countries and their developed and developing counterparts provide a possible explanation as to why the cross countries’ income inequalities as well as world inequality in income and development are reducing over time. On the other hand, the results of the time series approach display that credit and HDI are converging in both absolute and conditional terms but the countries are converging in conditional terms only for GDP. Thus, the claims of the World Bank are not valid for the selected countries in the chapter, rather, they can be verified by taking other countries and groups into consideration.

In continuation to Chapter 3, the present chapter tries to quantify the impact of credit upon GDP and HDI as the first attempt and the linkages of NPA and security investments with credit, GDP and HDI of the countries as the second attempt. For these purposes, this chapter starts with the measurements of credit elasticity with respect to GDP and HDI to know the impact of credit on the private sectors upon the income and human development of the countries. Then, it focuses on the implications of common banking operating tools such as their investments in the governments’ securities in relation to credit to the private sectors, GDP and HDI of the selected countries in a panel data format. The results of the credit elasticity of GDP show that it has taken the positive sign in all of the countries and the negative changes are very little in number. Furthermore, the results on the linkages show that all the variables are mostly cointegrated and therefore maintain stable and equilibrium relationships in the long run among them. But the short-run results show that investment and credit make a cause to NPA, and investment and NPA make a cause to GDP. No variables make any interrelationships with the HDI in either the long-run or short-run systems. Thus, the countries in the list should put more emphasis on the working of the financial sectors as the key partner in the income-generating activities.

The literature on sustainable development reveals that the financial sector and the real sector should maintain a coherent association in the long run. Thus, like that in a country-level significance, the relevance of the investigations of the interrelationships between the financial sector’s development and the growth and development of the states within a country is also required to be done. This chapter tries to examine the interrelationships between two sets of variables, bank credit and state output, and bank credit and human development, for the pre-reform and post-reform periods. Using the appropriate time series econometric analysis, the study finds no long-run relationships between credit and NSDP during the pre-reform period but it has observed a number of states where such stable relations hold during the post-reform period. Again, there are mixed results between the two in the Granger causality analysis during both the periods. There are the states like AP, Bihar, Karnataka, Kerala and WB where developments in the financial sector influence the growth of the real sector, while the reverse causality, that is, from the real sector to the financial sectors works in case of Assam, Haryana, MP and Maharashtra. Bidirectional causality between the two is observed in the states like TN, WB, etc. Further, the study finds very small number of states where credit and human development are interlinked in the long run. However, in the short run, the financial sector makes influences to the human development in case of the states like Bihar, Odisha and TN.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between trade, foreign direct investment (FDI) and income inequality for Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), using annual data from 1990 to 2016. The study attempts to answer a critical question: does openness affect income distribution?

The analysis of the model involves the examination of likely non-linear effects of both trade and FDI on income distribution. Therefore, system-generalized method of moments (SYS-GMM) estimator was applied to mitigate the problem of non-linearity and possible endogeneity. In the second stage, the model was extended to test the impact of education on income inequality. The hypothesis is that secondary school enrollment speeds up the process of adoption of contemporary technology and decreases inequality.

Trade and FDI have significant effects on income inequality when interacted with Gini-index; in case of trade, an inverted U-shaped curve holds as purposed by the trade theory. The components-wise effect of trade was held, except imports from advanced countries was found insignificant. Moreover, results were not found significant in case of human development index. Different results were found when trade and FDI interacted with education, which represents an important channel through which inequality is affected.

The study implies that CIS needs to re-design trade and FDI policies by encouraging trade and FDI inflows into industries and sectors aligned with structural adjustments, domestic industries uplift and investment in social infrastructure.

This is the first study that has examined the impact of openness of income distribution in case of CIS.