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A lot has been written on the impact of economic freedom and its components on economic growth. This paper focuses on financial freedom, which is one aspect of economic freedom. Financial freedom measures how deeply the government is involved in a nation’s financial industry and how that industry is open to foreign competition. The aim of this study is to measure the effect of financial freedom and other factors on gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. We estimate a model using panel data of 184 countries from 2012 to 2019. Our empirical estimations show that financial freedom positively affects per capita GDP, while tariff rates, corporate tax rates, unemployment, and inflation negatively affect per capita GDP.

How elderlies participate in social activities is a key issue in coping with aging and has an important impact on elderlies’ well-being. This paper examines the effects of different social participation patterns on the happiness of the elderlies in China. The empirical analysis was conducted based on the data from the China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) in 2015. The research results show that compared with reemployment after retirement, community governance is a more common way for retired people to be involved in social activities. We found that reemployment significantly reduces the happiness degree of the retired. Furthermore, this negative effect is more significant in samples without a formal labor contract, relatively lower education level, & senior retired people. In contrast, participating in community governance can significantly improve the happiness level of retirees, which is more essential in the sample of the medium education level and junior retirees.

Abstract Income inequality has, in recent years, become a serious issue especially in emerging markets. This paper examines the relationship of income inequality in the Asia-Pacific and Latin America regions to several factors such as gross capital formation, corruption, and per capita gross domestic product (GDP). Using a cross-sectional dataset of 36 countries from both regions for the year 2018 and ordinary least squares regression, the paper shows that gross capital formation and the lack of corruption have a negative and significant relationship with income inequality (as represented by the Gini coefficient). In contrast, per capita GDP has a positive and significant relationship with income inequality. Policymakers who want to rein in income inequality should therefore focus on ways to reduce corruption and increase the formation of capital. This study could be of use for those who are interested in discovering and mitigating the factors that cause income inequality in the developing world.

The paper examines the concept of green banking and sustainable financing, the forces driving green banking, and the reasons for this. The paper suggests that the move toward green banking and financing is the result of environmental degradation and the public’s demand for remediation. As enablers of the industries that create pollution, financial institutions bear a significant responsibility in leading the efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Also, greenhouse gas emissions are the result of market failures; therefore, there is a need for governments to act. The paper also examines the challenges facing green banking and its prospects. The conclusion is that while green banking displays good growth prospects, there exists three major challenges: (1) limited awareness of green products and services that banks can offer, (2) greenwashing, and (3) the high cost of offering green financial services. Despite these challenges, the paper affirms the potential of green banking to promote sustainability and mitigation of the environmental crisis.

The Philippines has had high levels of unemployment for years. During the 2000s, the unemployment rate hovered between seven and ten percent. High unemployment can have adverse effects on individuals and society. The question that this paper analyses is how unanticipated money growth affect the unemployment situation in the Philippines. There has been literature on the relationship between unanticipated growth on the money supply and unemployment. The paper proposes that only unanticipated money movements will affect real economic variables like unemployment and the output level. In order to test our hypothesis, it is important that we need to quantify the concepts of anticipated and unanticipated money movements. This paper uses time-series data on several economic variables as well as a model based on Geetha et al. (2023). Using an error-correction model, the results show that an unanticipated increase in M2 money is a factor that contributes to unemployment in Philippines.

Using a dynamic panel dataset of 150 countries for the period of 2006-2018 and a two-step system GMM estimation model, this paper shows that natural resources have a positive effect on economic development while holding corruption constant. Our findings support the notion that natural resources have a positive effect on the economy of a nation. When a country has less corruption, it improves the appropriation of economic gains from natural resources which serves as natural capital that would drive further capital accumulation and further development. We also find that physical capital, human capital, and freedom from corruption show strong positive effects on economic development, controlling for other economic and institutional variables.

The growth of nonemployer businesses as a share of the working-age population has been little studied relative to the decline of employer business rate in the United States. We show that local labor markets specializing in routine task-intensive jobs have experienced a higher adoption of information technology as well as the growth of nonemployer businesses primarily through increasing self-employment in nonroutine manual task-intensive jobs that are less frequently outsourced to business service firms. © 2024 Wiley Periodicals LLC.

COVID-19 pandemic has affected people’s daily life dramatically since December 2019. More than 211 million cases and 4.42 million deaths have been reported and confirmed all over the world. Long-term care facilities are taking the biggest hit during this pandemic, even after the spread-out of the vaccines. Globally, residents in long-term care facilities have experienced disproportionately high morbidity and mortality from COVID-19. Elderlies residing in long-term care facilities have the greatest susceptibility to COVID-19 and the poorest outcomes from infections. This chapter overviewed the insight, impact, and challenges of COVID-19 on the residential care homes in UK, US, and Australia and provided possible implications for the long-term care market post-pandemic.

This paper presents a study on 80 countries that evaluates the socioeconomic factors in containing the spread and mortality of COVID-19. Our results show that the long-term social factors such as lower personal freedom, better education in science, and past coronavirus outbreak experience are more effective than the economic factors such as higher healthcare-associated factors per 1000 population and larger GDP. However, using GDP per capita as the instrumental variable, we also find that the richer countries with a high degree of personal freedom have a higher number of infection or death cases per million population because they would be less likely to adhere to and implement the policy of the movement restrictions to restrict their access to goods and services.

The paper estimates the determinants of the growing volume of bilateral environmental aid for the mitigation of climate change using an empirically testable multilateral framework in which both donors and recipient countries compete in world export markets. As the potential donors weigh environmental benefits against the economic costs of providing aid, strategic interactions between the donors and the recipient countries as well as among the donors, influence the evolution of environmental aid. The paper shows that while the volume of bilateral environmental aid increases with the recipient country’s credible environmental commitment and bilateral trade volume, the competitive pressure in the export market reduces bilateral environmental aid. Free-riding incentives prevail among the individual donors, whereas the multilateral environmental aids that aim to restore the loss of global environmental resources without altering individual trade competitiveness can increase bilateral environmental aids.

Disruptive technological changes, including carbon capture and storage, can have macroeconomic rebound effects that pose a threat to long term environmental sustainability when not accompanied by pollution taxes. The paper demonstrates that when the elasticity of intertemporal substitution is less than one, implementing a Pigouvian tax effectively stabilizes pollution emissions, regardless of technical and consumption elasticities of substitution. However, if the elasticity of intertemporal substitution exceeds one, flexibility in technical or consumption substitution could cause sustainable growth to falter. The policy implications concerning the role of subsidies for clean technology are discussed.

Free trade agreements (FTAs) have mushroomed in the Asia-Pacific region over the past fifteen years. The Philippines is trying to forge several of these agreements in order to stay competitive. This paper examines the emergence of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) as well as the ASEAN Free Trade Agreement. This paper will discuss the advantages for the country by joining both the AFTA and the Japan Philippines Economic Partnership Agreement. It will also discuss several free trade agreements that are in effect in the region as well as efforts by the country to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). For the country to be a member of the TPP certain institutional reforms are needed to be put in place. The studies examined in this paper show that these FTAs in general have a positive effect on the Philippine economy.