Modeling the Social Determinants of Official COVID-19 Reports in the Early Stages of the Pandemic

The goal of this paper is to examine the role of social factors in the formation of country reports related to COVID-19 in the early stages of the pandemic. To this end, a linked database of countries’ COVID-19 reports and five composite variables (which compress the information content of 162 preliminary selected socioeconomic indicators) is analyzed by using regression models with regional dummy interactions. The main findings not only reflect the importance of foreign travel restrictions and airport controls but also show that in Europe and Africa, more corrupt countries have reported significantly fewer cases and deaths than countries in other regions.

India-BIMSTEC Bilateral Trade Activities

The Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi-Sectoral Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) is one of the solutions to converge the economic interests of India's Look East Policy and Thailand's Look West Policy. Its objective is to integrate the regions on both sides of the Bay of Bengal. The development of BIMSTEC countries is indispensable for the forward march of Asia as a whole. This chapter analyzes the India-BIMSTEC trade activities after the establishment of BIMSTEC bloc. Gravity model and Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) are used. The model estimates the sets of regression equations to measure the effects of regional trade agreements using ordinary least squares with nation dummies to capture country-specific fixed effects. The study reveals that all coefficients of regional dummy variables are mostly positive and significant, indicating the agreements that tend to enhance more trade than bilateral trade agreements. The authors state that based on India's trade with the BIMSTEC region, there exists a scope for intraregional trade in the future.

WHY MANUFACTURING INDUSTRY PERSISTED TO CLUSTER SPATIALLY IN JAVA?

This paper attempts to examine which theory is best in explaining the geographic concentration in Java, an island in which most of the Indonesia’s large and medium manufacturing industries have located overwhelmingly. Using the regional specialization index as a measure of geographic concentration of manufacturing industry and pooling data over the period 1991-J996, our econometric analysis integrates the perspectives of industry, region (space), and time. The most striking result is that most of the NCT (Neo-Classical Theory) hypotheses can be rejected. Moreover, most of the findings support the NTT (New Trade Theory) and NEG (New Economic Geography). Our findings suggest that manufacturing firms in Java seek to locate in more populous and densely populated areas to enjoy both localization economies and urbanization economies, as shown by the significance of scale economies and income per capita. The interplay of agglomeration economies is intensified by the imperfect competition of Java's market structure. This paper gives empirical evidence with respect to path dependency hypotheses. This finding supports the NEG's belief that history matters: older firms tend to enhance regional specialization. In addition, the results, as shown by statistical significance of its regional dummy, suggest that most of the specialized industries in Java have better access to infrastructure.