Remittance dependence, support for taxation and quality of public services in Africa

We explore the heterogeneous effect of migrant remittances on citizens' support for taxation using a sample comprising 45,000 individuals from the Afrobarometer survey round 7 [2016–2018] across 34 African countries. To correct for unobserved heterogeneity, we endogenously identify latent classes/subtypes of individuals that share similar...

Learning-by-exporting in South Africa: The influence of global value chain (GVC) participation and technological capability*

Using the South African Revenue Service and National Treasury firm-level panel data for 2009–2017, this paper investigates how trade related to the global value chain (GVC) affects the performance of manufacturing firms in South Africa. The paper uses extant classifications of internationally traded products to identify different categories...

PGP for portfolio optimization: application to ESG index family

The conventional portfolio design approach assumes Gaussian return distributions, but this is not accurate in practice. Asymmetric and heavy-tailed return distributions necessitate consideration of higher-order moments such as skewness and kurtosis, in addition to mean and variance. This study proposes a multi-objective approach using a mean...

Do geopolitical risks and global market factors influence the dynamic dependence among regional sustainable investments and major commodities?

This paper uses the Quantile Vector-Autoregressive (Q-VAR) technique to examine the connectedness between three regional (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific) sustainability indices and major natural resource commodities including energy commodities (crude oil and natural gas), precious metals (gold, silver, and platinum), and industrial...

Too big to be ignored: How energy poverty undermines productive efficiency

Productive efficiency has far-reaching implications on the direction of economic growth and welfare. While this has led to an expansive literature on the drivers of productive efficiency, this literature has proceeded without considering the role of energy poverty. Yet, energy poverty affects productive efficiency on several fronts. This paper...

Trade for catch-up: examining how global value chains participation affects productive efficiency

A substantial part of production and trade now takes place through global value chains (GVC), making it an essential conduit of knowledge spillover and technology transfer. Yet, extant studies examining how countries become productively efficient and catch-up to the global efficiency frontier through international trade have ignored the possible...

Dependence and risk spillovers among clean cryptocurrencies prices and media environmental attention

This paper examines the relationships among cryptocurrency environmental attention and clean cryptocurrencies prices using Time-Varying Parameter Vector Auto-Regression (TVP-VAR) and wavelets techniques. Results show strong connectedness among these variables, implying that the prices of clean cryptocurrencies are influenced by attention on...

Dynamic dependence and predictability between volume and return of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs): The roles of market factors and geopolitical risks

We examine the dependence between volume and returns for the NFT market and three sub-markets (Cryptokitties, Cryptopunks, and Decentraland) using both quantile cross-spectral coherency and quantile regression techniques. Results from both techniques show significant evidence of dependence between NFT return and volume. Dependence between volume...

Quantile co-movement and dependence between energy-focused sectors and artificial intelligence

This paper examines the dependence between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and eight energy-focused sectors (including renewable energy and coal) across different market conditions and investment horizons. This paper adopts both linear and non-linear models such as quantile regressions and quantile cross-spectral coherency models. Evidence from the...

Global commodity and equity markets spillovers to Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper examines the connectedness among 12 African equity markets and the global commodity, developed equity markets, paying particular attention to their evolution during the COVID-19 pandemic's peak period. We find that whilst African equity markets connect weakly to these markets, the levels of connectedness among these markets improved...