Pork-barrel spending is the use of federal money for localized projects that yield only a narrow geographic benefit. It is a commonly held belief that politicians use this spending to improve their chances of re-election. One way that an incumbent can increase their chances of re-election is...

The external financing of fiscal deficit is key to bridging public revenue shortfalls within developing economies. However, the public expenditure responses to the incoming foreign financial assistances, as documented in the existing literature, depict ambiguity with respect to the nature of the...

This paper investigates the threshold of the cyclical adjusted primary balance (CAPB) that can be attributed to fiscal consolidation in South Africa. The CAPB framework is used in the threshold autoregressive regime (TAR) from 1979 to 2022. The contribution of the paper is the estimation of the...

This study analyses the influence of economic growth on inequality, concentrating on the role of governments as mediators. The period studied is from 2000 to 2020, encompassing 11 post Soviet countries. The primary estimation method used is the two-stage least squares for panel data. Despite the...

We employ a recent empirical strategy to estimate country-specific and time-varying total factor productivity (TFP) levels for the manufacturing sector of 63 countries over 40 years. The methodology is based on estimated country-specific production functions while accounting for cross-section...

The issue of polarization, as opposed to inequality, has been little explored in European countries. In this paper, using data provided by the Luxembourg Income Studies Database, we look at the trend of income polarization in 12 European countries, the only ones available with two comparable...

The impact of economic growth on unemployment is commonly agreed and extensively studied. However, how age and gender shape this relationship is not as well explored, while there is an absence of research on whether education plays a role. We apply Okun's law, aiming to estimate age-, gender-...

This paper analyses theoretical and empirical scientific literature about the impact of technological innovations on unemployment, considering the former as a key driver of long-term productivity and economic growth. Using panel data from 25 European countries for the period of 2000–2012, we...

The recession in India and the UK peaked in 2017 due to the implications of new policy initiatives. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic at the beginning of 2020 intensified the crisis, causing a drastic decline in aggregate demand and output. India and the UK have resorted to monetary and...

The present study examines how policy makers should consider the quality of institutional framework to reduce the productivity gap and increase a country's ability to absorb superior technologies developed elsewhere. This paper analyzes the impact of components of economic freedom, such as the...