Copper will bolster economic improvements in Peru

Significance The booming copper industry will stimulate production overall while helping to bolster export earnings and treasury receipts. The Castillo administration has produced proposals for tax and other financial reforms which, if approved by Congress, will raise Peru’s low tax take and make the tax system somewhat more progressive. Impacts Peru will see inflation rise this year and next. Reserves will be sufficient to allay problems arising from capital flight. Treasury income from the proposed reforms will yield less than hoped for.

Renewable Energy Demand, Financial Reforms and Environmental Quality in West Africa

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG-7) stipulates the need for clean energy, reduced carbon emissions, prevention of environmental degradation, promotion of biodiversity, and ecosystem preservation. Towards achieving these goals, this study provides new evidence on the causal link between renewable energy demand, financial reforms, economic growth, foreign direct investment, and environmental quality among emerging West African economies. The study adopted the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares, Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares, Pooled Mean group estimation and Granger causality test for its analysis. It was found that renewable energy demand has been favorable to the environmental health of West African economies. Also, financial reforms made within the region contributed to increasing the ecological footprints of the region. Direct investments from foreign companies showed encouraging results as it improves the environment quality. We also found a unidirectional causality from ecological footprints to renewable energy demand and financial reforms but a bidirectional relationship with economic growth and foreign direct investment. Moreover, it was evident that ecological footprints granger causes financial reforms and economic growth but not vice versa. Policy recommendations outlined encourages governments and policy-makers to embark on intensive clean energy technologies and effective green financial reforms to help achieve Sustainable Development Goals.

Financial Reforms and Consumption Smoothing

We study how financial reforms affect the extent of consumption smoothing in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model of an emerging economy. Consistent with the empirical literature and reform efforts in South Korea and South Africa, we emphasize the relation between consumer credit and durable purchases, and model reforms as the relaxation of the collateral constraint on lower income households. We find that the relaxation of the collateral constraint accounts for a substantial share of the decline in consumption smoothing experienced in South Korea and South Africa.

Defining financial reforms in the 19th-century capitalist world-economy: The Ottoman case (1838–1914)

Capitalist-style reforms were an important factor in the economic and social evolution of the Late Ottoman Empire. This research investigates how foreign governments and financiers, and especially Britain, influenced these various financial reforms implemented in the Ottoman Empire during the 19th century. The chief purpose of such reforms was to integrate the Empire into the capitalist world-economy by imposing, both directly and indirectly, the adoption of rules, institutions, attitudes and procedures amenable to exploitation on the part of foreign and also local capitalists. Drawing on primary sources, mainly from the United Kingdom’s National Archives, the article argues that foreign pressure for financial reforms was instrumental in the Empire’s economic subjection to the rules and norms that regulated the capitalist world-economy, most notably in the field of public finance, banking and the monetary sector. It takes a long-term view and largely adheres to the scholarly evolution of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony and world-systems theory and methodology developed by Fernand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein and Giovanni Arrighi, adopting a multidisciplinary and macro-scale perspective. Special attention is paid to the correlation between secondary and primary sources in support of empirical evidence. More broadly, this research contributes to the literature on the capitalist world-economy and brings a set of theoretical frameworks to bear on defining the role of financial reforms induced mainly by Britain in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries.