Key Economic Processes Research Articles

The impact of COVID-19 on the African economy and the role of global institutions: A review

Covid-19 became a global challenge even though the African Region's people were less affected as per reported statistics. The pandemic hit all economies resulting in the deterioration of critical economic indicators. It is evidenced by the abnormal fall of the prices in different sectors, such as energy, mining, agriculture, aviation, and travel industry, and in the financial markets, followed by abnormal unemployment across many sectors. This paper reviewed the impact of COVID-19 on the key economic processes in the African Region. Specifically, it looked at examining the role of leading global institutions in mitigating the economic impact of the pandemic to the countries of the African Region and the role of global institutions in uplifting the African economy. Due to a limited number of researches on the impact of Covid-19, data collection methods are the same as those applied in other systematic reviews. Reporting standards established by other social science journals; the evaluation, statistical and meta-analytic literature; and expert opinions. Two independent reviewers abstracted the study, reconciled it with the development team, and provided feedback. The covid-19 pandemic hit several economic areas such as agriculture, mining, aviation industry, and financial markets. African countries took several initiatives to fight against the Covid-19 pandemic in collaboration with global institutions such as WHO and IMF. African countries took initiatives in areas such as business innovation and financial support for financial institutions, improving health infrastructure and researches activities on Covid-19 as well improving people's livelihood. Also, African countries are recommended to follow global institutions' advice and guidelines for economic recovery.

Электронный прокьюремент в России: цифровизация отдельных процессов

In this study, the current level and prospects of digitalisation and automation of key economic pro-cesses in public and corporate procurement were assessed, as well as their role in improving the effi-ciency of procurement results. The work involved a combination of general scientific methods, includ-ing statistical and comparative analysis, the study of expert prognoses, a systematic approach, the method of optimal decision-making and expert evaluations. A comprehensive analysis of the digitalisa-tion and automation of procurement in the Russian Federation was carried out considering the regula-tory legislation on procurement (in terms of regulatory requirements). An expert conformity-assessment of the current digitalisation level of procurement business processes with the actual de-mands of economic agents was carried out. The results showed that regulated procurement in the Russian Federation undergoes the initial stage of digital transformation. The electronisation and auto-mation of procurement business processes are highly irregular under the duality in the procurement legislation. In a number of areas, this results in higher transaction costs for economic agents. It was also revealed that inadequate regulatory practices in specific processes significantly slow down their digital transformation. In the IT sector of state procurement, it is necessary to expand the use of inno-vative technologies. The dependence of critical IT infrastructure on foreign software and equipment should be minimal.

Gospodarka wartości. Pomiędzy ceną a „ukrytą ręką kultury”

An economy of values: Between price and the hidden hand of culture The term value is commonly used to describe key economic processes and refers to objects, people, economy, and economics. Among the many issues relevant to the relationship of culture and economy the use of the term value in reference to the object — especially in the context of utility value and exchange value — is of particular interest. In cultural studies, a mark-to-market utility is combined with existential i.e.biological and psychological requirements and civilizational advance, which stand in opposition to culture. The author indicates, however, that the sources of the utility of merchandise purchased on a daily basis are manifold and are nowadays primarily related to cultural preferences. As a consequence, the possibility of replacing the current economic model with a more sustainable one is largely blocked by the hidden hand of culture.

Firm productivity, heterogeneity and macroeconomic dynamics: a data-driven investigation

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we offer a unique firm-level view of the empirical regularities underlying the evolution of the Lithuanian economy over the period of 2000–2014. Employing a novel dataset, we investigate key distributional moments of real and financial variables of Lithuanian firms. We focus in particular on the issues related to productivity, firm birth and death and the associated employment creation and destruction across firm sizes, industry classification and trade status (exporting vs. non-exporting). We refrain from any structural modelling attempt in order to map out the key economic processes across industries and selected firm characteristics. Nevertheless, existing theoretical and empirical findings guide our analysis and the selection of the main variables to investigate. We uncover similar regularities as already highlighted in the literature: trade participation and firm productivity are strongly positively linked, the 2008 recession has had a cleansing effect on the non-tradable sector, firm birth (death) is highly pro(counter)-cyclical. The richness of the dataset allows us to produce additional insights: for example, we observe an increasing share of exporting but a constant share of importing firms since 2000.

Enhanced Gravity Model of Trade: Reconciling Macroeconomic and Network Models

The structure of the International Trade Network (ITN), whose nodes and links represent world countries and their trade relations respectively, affects key economic processes worldwide, including globalization, economic integration, industrial production, and the propagation of shocks and instabilities. Characterizing the ITN via a simple yet accurate model is an open problem. The traditional Gravity Model successfully reproduces the volume of trade between connected countries, using macroeconomic properties such as GDP, geographic distance, and possibly other factors. However, it predicts a network with complete or homogeneous topology, thus failing to reproduce the highly heterogeneous structure of the ITN. On the other hand, recent maximum-entropy network models successfully reproduce the complex topology of the ITN, but provide no information about trade volumes. Here we integrate these two currently incompatible approaches via the introduction of an Enhanced Gravity Model (EGM) of trade. The EGM is the simplest model combining the Gravity Model with the network approach within a maximum-entropy framework. Via a unified and principled mechanism that is transparent enough to be generalized to any economic network, the EGM provides a new econometric framework wherein trade probabilities and trade volumes can be separately controlled by any combination of dyadic and country-specific macroeconomic variables. The model successfully reproduces both the global topology and the local link weights of the ITN, parsimoniously reconciling the conflicting approaches. It also indicates that the probability that any two countries trade a certain volume should follow a geometric or exponential distribution with an additional point mass at zero volume.

Tuning of Cost Drivers by Significance Occurrences and Their Calibration with Novel Software Effort Estimation Method

Estimation is an important part of software engineering projects, and the ability to produce accurate effort estimates has an impact on key economic processes, including budgeting and bid proposals and deciding the execution boundaries of the project. Work in this paper explores the interrelationship among different dimensions of software projects, namely, project size, effort, and effort influencing factors. The study aims at providing better effort estimate on the parameters of modified COCOMO along with the detailed use of binary genetic algorithm as a novel optimization algorithm. Significance of 15 cost drivers can be shown by their impact on MMRE of efforts on original 63 NASA datasets. Proposed method is producing tuned values of the cost drivers, which are effective enough to improve the productivity of the projects. Prediction at different levels of MRE for each project reflects the percentage of projects with desired accuracy. Furthermore, this model is validated on two different datasets which represents better estimation accuracy as compared to the COCOMO 81 based NASA 63 and NASA 93 datasets.

Green economy and governance in cities: assessing good governance in key urban economic processes

Cities concentrate a large part of the world economy today. Understanding how the urban economy and its decision making function as well as how they are connected to a larger world (regional, national, global) is fundamental to create governance mechanisms and the institutions to move the world towards a green economy. This paper analyzes the city through its key economic processes of the transformation of space; circulation (transport); consumption and production and social, knowledge and ecosystem services. Transforming urban processes will only be achieved with better urban governance. As governance is embedded in institutions, it is the foundation for building the legitimate political and social mechanisms to green socio-ecological and economic systems. Yet the question of whether or not current governance systems in these processes are steering cities towards a greener economy, or if they are, how are they affecting people and ecosystems is yet to be addressed. Thus, we propose a set of governance indicators to assess the greening of urban processes that go beyond the decision-making procedures and include the capacity to implement change, the results of greening the economy and final outcomes on the ground. We also look at the obstacles, achievements and lessons in the greening of the direct and indirect economic processes in cities.

‘Island life’: Basking in isolation

This paper offers a different perspective to Jamie Peck's on economic geography’s ‘island life’. It sees economic geography hiding from the storm created by economics’ foray into geography (so-called new economic geography), on an island of self-referential reasoning behind defences of multi-layered social theorising. It is critical of both economic geographies, with each transfixed by its own theoretical eccentricities and neither saying anything substantial about the key economic processes and monumental problems of deep and continuing recession within the global economy. The paper offers a range of issues that need to be addressed.

Globalisation, Regulation, Urbanisation: The Case of the Netherlands

This paper traces some of the linkages between globalisation and social regulation via the example of the Netherlands. The paper is in four main sections. The first section considers recent debates on globalisation through an attempt to identify key economic processes. The second section considers the main objections that have been made to the globalisation thesis, and especially its lack of attention to matters of social regulation. The third section considers the way in which the Dutch economy has been able to become comparatively successful through a judicious blend of globalisation and social regulation. The final section of the paper then considers the special role of the Randstad in promoting this concordat.

Transmission of World Growth Cycle to the Indian Economy

Our earlier studies of the short-run economic fluctuations in India have led us to the following main conclusions: (a) The Indian economy has not been free from substantial short-period fluctuations in economic activity. A large number of key economic processes such as industrial productions, factory employment, fixed capital formation, stock exchanges, money credit, interest rates, commodity and security prices, profits of public limited companies, exports, imports, etc., show more or less synchronous movements around their respective long-term trends.