Despite several benefits, the crop insurance adoption rate is observed as low in India. Numerous studies have, therefore, enquired about the reason behind low adoption, and further, a few cross-section studies have estimated its impact on farmers’ well-being, and the findings are mixed in nature. Using data from both rounds of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), i.e. 2004–2005 and 2011–2012, this study aims to identify the major determinants of adoption and to evaluate its impact on farm households’ well-being. In the case of the former, we find the major determinants, namely, education of the household head, livestock ownership, outstanding debt, landholding, membership in credit groups, access to several government benefits, and previously experienced disasters. Employing a difference-in-difference (DID) model for the latter, we observe that crop insurance improves farmers’ well-being, i.e. per-capita consumption expenditure was 12–28% more for the insured farmers between 2004–2005 and 2011–2012. Hence, this study advocates for further scaling up crop insurance adoption in India as it supports the farmers to diversify risks and smoothening consumption.

This study explores the moderating role of trade credit in the value-creation process of firms. Through panel data analysis of annual data from publicly listed firms in ten developing Asian economies, we found that both investing in capacity expansion and engaging in trade credit activity positively impact the value creation process. However, the combination of capacity expansion and trade credit leads to enhanced value creation. The findings highlight the roles played by both borrowed and supplied trade credit in this process. By examining the role of trade credit as a catalyst between corporate investment and value creation, this study provides valuable insights for policymakers and practitioners. The results suggest that firms in these economies should consider increasing their trade finance activity to achieve higher value through capacity expansion. To ensure the validity of the findings, the study conducts a series of robustness checks, including alternative regression specifications, different measures of the key variables, and diverse sample compositions.

This is the first empirical study that analyzes the nature of business cycles in India using quarterly GDP growth data from 1998Q1 to 2022Q4 and the Markov Switching Auto-regressive model. In order to capture the impact of exclusion and inclusion of post pandemic period data, it has developed two alternative models. Based on these models, the study provides the forecast of quarterly GDP growth and cumulative real output losses due to the pandemic. It also provides alternative scenarios and trajectories of the Indian economy towards the US$ 5 trillion milestone. It is our hope that these results will be useful to policymakers and other stakeholders to understand the business cycle issue in India and take appropriate strategies to overcome the problems associated with these cycles.

To explore the effect of targeted poverty alleviation policies in Guangdong Province from the perspective of causal inference, this paper conducts quantitative research based on panel data of poverty-stricken counties in Guangdong Province from 2013 to 2020. Specifically, breakpoint regression is used to analyze the initial effect of the policy, instrumental variables are used to analyze the long-term effect of the policy implementation, and finally, the generalized comprehensive control method is used to make a comparative study. The results show that: (1) The targeted poverty alleviation policy in Guangdong Province has a remarkable effect on poverty reduction; (2) The effect of targeted poverty alleviation policy is still remarkable by comparing the implemented policy with the unimplemented one in Guangdong Province; (3) The improvement of market economic activity can effectively promote the increase of farmers’ personal net income in poor areas of Guangdong Province.

This article examines within-sector resource misallocation in three Southeast Asian countries—Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. The methodology accounts for measurement error in revenues and costs. The firm-level evidence suggests that measurement error is substantial, resulting in an overestimation of misallocation by as much as 30%. Nevertheless, resource misallocation across firms within a sector remains large, albeit declining. The findings imply that there are considerable potential gains from efficient reallocation—above 80% for Indonesia and around 20% to 30% for Malaysia and Vietnam. Private domestic firms and firms with higher productivity appear to face larger distortions that prevent them from expanding.

Does China’s growing economic presence pose an opportunity or a threat to regional economic integration? The authors answer this question by analyzing longitudinal and cross-country evidence from three regions, Central, South, and Southeast Asia. A unique panel dataset detailing bilateral economic cooperation and each economy’s political-economic factors from 2000 to 2019 was examined. This study concludes that (1) inbound foreign direct investment from China is positively associated with a country’s intra-regional integration, (2) trade ties to China show a negative relationship with intra-regional integration, and (3) the level of a country’s regional economic integration is conditioned by domestic economic and political factors such as transportation and information connectivity, per capita GDP, population size, trade openness, and public governance. This article contributes to the literature by using fresh cross-regional evidence to decipher the China effect on regional integration, embedding the political economy at both national and regional levels, and identifying variations and significance of various political-economic factors.

This paper analyzes the impact of monetary policy, banking liquidity, and macroeconomic factors on the government bond yield in Vietnam by employing a VAR model. Our findings show that the central bank policy interest rate plays a significant role in government bond yield both in the short- and long-term. There was a downward trend of government bonds in the period 2007–2019 thanks to the improvement of banking system liquidity as well as macroeconomic stability. The results are robust when the government bond yield is computed by three factors, including level, slope, and curvature.

This paper elucidates Indonesia’s resource-cum-industrial policy to leverage domestic nickel resources for building a localised value chain from mining to electric vehicles. The value chain is first mapped in order to facilitate the policy analysis. While Indonesia is successful in attracting investment projects which aim to build the value chain from mining to electric vehicle batteries within her borders, our analysis nevertheless finds that this process must be rather attributed to value chain lead firm strategy than Indonesian resource policy. Further, the final stage of electric vehicle assembly is only sparsely developed, suggesting that the attempted integration of forward linkage creation from mining and simultaneous backward linkage creation from vehicle assembly is not systematically deployed.

The study analyzed the historical functional relationship between weather change and crops yield in Telangana state. This study uses 42 years of district-level data of three crops-viz., rice, maize, and groundnut. The estimated Panel-Corrected Standard Error (PCSE) model results found that the impact of weather variables on crops yield are season specific and varies across crops in Telangana. Crops yield, in both Kharif and Rabi seasons, are more sensitive to average maximum temperature (), average minimum temperature () and rainfall variables. Non-weather variables including fertilizer, irrigation and labor significantly influence crops yield in the state and played role in neutralizing the effects of weather variables. Further, the influence of weather-related variables on crops yield differs on different growth phases of the crops across seasons in Telangana. The study findings clarify the idiosyncratic climatic impacts on agriculture in Telangana and call for location and season-specific adaptation policies to minimize future climatic stress.

The main objective of this paper is to clarify the impact of education on income inequality in a decentralized Indonesia. This paper uses Indonesian provincial-level data from 2001 to 2018 and dynamic panel estimation techniques to deal with the estimation’s potential persistence and endogeneity problems. The result provides evidence that the higher level of fiscal decentralization, the weaker the effect of schoolyears on income inequality. Fiscal decentralization moderates the positive relationship between schoolyears and income inequality such that the relationship is weakened when the level of fiscal decentralization is higher and stronger when the level of fiscal decentralization is lower. Fiscal decentralization may enable the local government to improve its capacity to reduce the income inequality increases caused by improved educational outcomes. This paper proposes a set of policy recommendations for the government to alleviate the effect of education outcomes on income inequality using fiscal decentralization.