AGOA exclusion adds to economic pressure on Ethiopia

Significance This adds to the bad economic news for the country, which recently had to postpone its second telecoms licensing round, is still waiting to restructure its foreign debt and faces huge reconstruction costs in conflict-affected areas. Impacts Foreign companies that have evacuated personnel, let alone tourists, may be slow to return until the security situation improves markedly. A debt restructuring deal should be reached this year, easing fiscal pressure after the end of the G20 Debt Service Suspension Initiative. Ethiopia’s AGOA exclusion is not up for review again until 2023, and could even be extended absent real improvement in the situation.

The Impact of Digital and Green Innovation Strategy on Citizen Trust Towards Sustainable Financial Performance of Local Government

The unit of analysis in this study is local government data from Indonesia. The goal of this research is to identify the impact of fiscal stress and citizen trust on digital and green innovation strategies. This study also seeks to as certain the impact of digital and green innovation strategies on the impact of fiscal stress and citizen trust on sustainable financial performance. This research uses a descriptive verification method in conjunction with a quantitative approach. Path analysis is an analytical method used in the processing of statistical data. The research samples in this study are 148 Regional Apparatus Organizations (OPD) from East Java Province. The tests showed that fiscal pressure and citizen trust have a significant impact on digital and green innovation strategies. The test results also show that fiscal stress and digital and green innovation strategies have a significant effect on sustainable financial performance, whereas citizen trust has no significant effect on sustainable financial performance. Simultaneously, digital and green innovation strategy are critical for mitigating the impact of fiscal stress and increasing citizens' trust sustainable financial performance.

Mozambique party politics may trump national interest

Significance There is broad consensus that security sector reform is necessary, but lingering concern that the government lacks a coherent plan, and will end up being distracted by other issues. Impacts The economic crisis resulting from the debt crisis will continue to put the government under severe fiscal pressure. Small amounts of gas should begin to be exported in 2022, but uncertainty over the timelines for larger projects will persist. Mozambique’s relations with neighbours should continue to improve over the immediate term.

Imagine there’s no heaven: Imaginaries of local government austerity

This article critically analyses the management of public sector austerity. Focusing on the case of UK local government chief executives, we develop the concept of austerity imaginaries. We provide four examples of these based on extensive interviewing. Offered as a theoretical concept, austerity imaginaries involve shared understandings of the role and potential for local government during times of acute fiscal pressure. We contribute empirical knowledge about the local dynamics of austerity and contribute to critical scholarship in this field. We argue that a simple thesis of ruination and destruction can obscure the creative work involved at the front line and we advocate the value of engaging both critically and empathetically with the everyday meanings in action of public managers working in circumstances far from their choosing. At the same time, the imaginaries reveal the insidious ways in which neoliberal assumptions about the public sector appear to delimit the scope for action.

Path Dependence in Sovereign Debt Modelling: System Dynamics Approach

The article offers a system dynamic modelling of sovereign debt using the path dependence concept. Using simulation modelling we are trying to find a fixed point in a motion of national sovereign debt towards its equilibrium and to change the existing mental model perception towards sovereign debt by changing the structure of the system.The research reveals the idea of the “debt snowball concept” using recursive dynamic approach. The dynamic linear and nonlinear recursive models of Ukrainian sovereign debt with the appropriate multi – order recursive equations are constructed.The fixed point as an equilibrium value for a country’s sovereign debt stock to GDP ratio with a linear dependence has been built. Finding the initial point for resolving sovereign debt issue is especially actual for national economy under strong fiscal pressure caused by COVID-19 and wartime on the East of the country. For this purpose, the sovereign debt cyclical behaviour was also reproduced using phase plot graphic.The fixed point as an equilibrium value for a country’s sovereign debt stock to GDP ratio with a nonlinear dependence was determined. The main purpose of this part of the analysis was to show the more complicated oscillated behaviour of the system and the multiplicity of possible equilibrium points.The stock and flows SD modelling and simulation analysis of sovereign debt in Ukrainian economy allows to make the conclusion of the inevitability of the sovereign debt existence even on the stable level and with the balanced national budget. JEL classіfіcatіon: E60, H63, H68

Fiscal Pressure as a Trigger of Financial Performance for the Energy Industry: An Empirical Investigation across a 16-Year Period

Taxation exerts pressure on the economic activities of all companies, including economic entities that operate in the energy industry. This study examined the degree to which fiscal pressure influenced the financial performance of 88 publicly listed companies from the energy industry during a time frame of 16 years (2005Q1–2020Q3). By modelling financial data from the oil, gas and electricity sectors with panel data techniques, our results showed that fiscal pressure had a significant effect on the evolution of company financial performance measured by return on assets, return on equity and return on investment. The study revealed that fiscal pressure had a more positive impact on the financial performance of energy companies than a negative impact. This conclusion is important for overall taxation in the energy industry since corporate taxes, excise duties and mandatory labor contributions are basic resources for state budgets. Our empirical results imply important research directions on the prospect of analyzing company performance.

The Sovereign-Bank Nexus in the Face of the COVID-19 Pandemic Outbreak—Evidence from EU Member States

The major focus of this paper is on the sovereign–banks relationship following the COVID-19 pandemic crisis outbreak, with a view to gaining an insight into banks’ exposure to the sovereign. We rely on a series of complementary research approaches, such as desk research, comparative statistical analysis, exploratory learning algorithm, and a deterministic panel regression framework. The analysis reveals that most EU countries were not prepared for the pandemic crisis as they lacked a financial security buffer. The growing fiscal pressure and lockdown restrictions additionally resulted in an increase in banks’ exposure to the government debt market and higher government debt securities exposure on their balance sheets. One of the novelties of the research is the adoption of the gap method in order to measure the changes between banking assets major items (government securities vs. loans) and uncovering the preference for holding a specific type of asset. Additional insight is brought by the clustering solution, which shows increased cross-country heterogeneity in terms of the sovereign–banks relationship. Empirical research shows that banks’ involvement in the sovereign debt market is sensitive mainly to negative information related to pandemic occurrence and, to a lower extent, to positive information reflected by government’s reactions and economic stimulus measures. In addition, our results reveal there is no crowding-out effect triggered by the pandemic, in terms of lending to the sovereign against lending to the real economy. In the pandemic onset banks did not proceed to a sharp portfolio rebalancing in favor of the sovereign.

Prosecutors and their Legislatures, Legislatures and their Prosecutors

This chapter explores the often-pathological relationship between prosecutors and legislatures and considers fiscal pressure as an important antidote to the pathology. Institutional incentives between prosecutors and legislatures align in a way quite different than the classic separation of powers story. Rather, legislatures are well served to empower prosecutors as much as possible by making criminal law broad and deep. And with respect to substantive criminal law, prosecutors have been enormously empowered. Prosecutors are not merely passive recipients of such power but indeed actively lobby for it—often quite successfully. But fiscal pressures can provide a cross-cutting pressure for legislatures, particularly at the state level where many governments must balance their budgets. Thus, sentencing law sometimes finds legislatures refusing prosecutors’ requests for ever longer or mandatory minimum sentences because longer sentences are expensive; this is especially true where sentencing commissions provide legislatures with meaningful data on costs of particular proposals. Criminal procedure has recently found progressive prosecutors leading the way toward defendant-friendly reforms such as using unaffordable money bail less frequently and providing defendants with more discovery than is required by law. In these spaces, county prosecutors have provided laboratories of experimentation that led the way toward broader statewide reforms.