Thailand's increasing importance as a regional co-production base and as an intra-regional trade and border trade hub is due mainly to recent changes in its economic structure, namely, the lack of operational workers, rises in wages, and increases in outward foreign direct investment (FDI),...

Investment in infrastructure for increasing trade and connectivity in South Asia and Southeast Asia has been impacted by a reduction in commercial bank participation in project financing, which has significantly increased the role of multilateral financial institutions and export credit...

The recent experience of infrastructure investment in the People's Republic of China (PRC) suggests an intertwined relationship between investment, urbanization, and economic growth. In one mechanism, urbanization generates demand for infrastructure investment, which then drives economic growth...

One of the main challenges in low-income Asia and the Pacific countries is users' willingness to pay for water services. In contrast, investors and private operators in the water sector prefer a high rate of return. This has often led to the failure of public-private partnerships for water...

This paper investigates whether better access to markets through an improved road network plays a role in improving the profitability of firms in India. We construct a district-level market access index using Indian road network shapefiles, district boundaries, and nightlight raster images and...

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the importance of information and communication technology (ICT) not only for the economy but also for human well-being. However, the investment gap in ICT infrastructure has been growing and is expected to reach more than $30 billion by 2040. We argue that one...

This paper introduces a new index of financial inclusion for 153 advanced, emerging, and developing economies using a comprehensive set of new indicators, grouped into four different dimensions: financial access, usage, financial development, and fintech infrastructure. The fintech...

The study investigates the relationship between the green economy and poverty in South Africa from 1990 to 2017. Data on green economy indicators such as share of clean energy, CO2 emissions, human development index, secondary school enrolment, life expectancy at birth and access to electricity...

The dividend payout problem in literature has largely been misspecified. The roles of dividends as signals, agency cost reducers, fixed income providers or even the invariance of dividend payouts are all phenomenon that, based on market conditions, follow from the role of dividends as equalizers...

Given that India's urban areas contribute to nearly two-thirds of its gross domestic product, even though they account for only 31% of the country's population, they have been rightly called the engines of India's growth. In this paper, I answer the following questions: What are the economic...