Mali has introduced a program to produce biodiesel using jatropha, a shrub widely available throughout the country. The aim of the program is to partially substitute diesel, which is entirely supplied through imports, with domestically produced biodiesel. In this paper, we use a computable...

Income improvement is the primary expectation when deciding to migrate. However, due to the limited resources and urban facilities, informal sector work leads to an increasing income gap with local workers, migrant workers in big cities are considered the most vulnerable population. When there...

This paper argues that income inequality explains the variation in the economic performance of different countries over the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Unlike the conclusions reported by some studies, this study shows that health casualties caused by COVID-19 has had a higher adverse...

One way to reduce inequality and poverty is to promote tax justice. In 2021, the government of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, implemented a program (the Devolve-ICMS Program) that refunds consumption tax to low-income citizens (cashback). This study aims to evaluate the impacts of this...

The issue of income disparity has long plagued South Africa because of the political environment that existed before the country's 1994 democratic transition. Based on the widely used Gini index, which gauges global inequality, the nation routinely has some of the highest rates of income...

Background: Since the latter part of the 20th Century, countries have been particularly challenged by the trade-off that exists between delivering generous welfare provisions and strong economic growth. Such dynamics have stimulated a need to better understand the causes of income inequality so...

In the last 60 years, the results of development aid have been mixed. Thus far, it has been mostly the aid recipient countries, which have been held responsible for aid’s shortcomings. That focus is misplaced, however, since the donor countries, through development aid, also export some of their...

Cluster analysis is used to explore the performance of key macroeconomic variables in European countries that share the euro, from the inception of the currency in 2002 through to 2013. An original applied statistical approach searches for a pattern synthesis across a matrix of macroeconomic...

The European Central Bank (ECB) engaged in an expanded asset purchase programme (APP) from 2014 to 2018 to help achieve their primary objective of price stability. Total assets purchased over this period was over €2.5 trillion and new net purchases ended in December 2018. This paper identifies...

This paper investigates the effects of macroeconomic uncertainty on economic growth in the presence of fiscal consolidation in South Africa. Markov-switching dynamic regression (MSDR) and time-varying parameter vector autoregression (TVP-VAR) were performed using time series data from 1994 to...