Prospects for African economies in 2022

Significance However, this recovery remains below global growth for the second consecutive year, further widening global income disparities and possibly undermining crucial domestic spending well into the medium term.

Postgraduate training system and scientific and pedagogical activity in assessments of French PhD students

Discussed are issues of postgraduate training system in France. The European system of doctoral training was always effective, had a great diversity of programs, wide opportunities for the graduates. It set trends for postgraduate training systems all over the world. France is the second economy of the European Union, producing almost a fifth of the European Union’s GDP. This country is among the leaders that allocate a large number of funds to finance the research sector. In 2018, France’s gross domestic spending on R&D was 2.3%. In this regard, the social survey of French PhD students was conducted. They were asked to answer questions about the effectiveness of the French postgraduate training system as a whole and to assess the social and psychological side of the doctoral education process. We considered such aspects of the problem as the competitiveness of the French doctoral school in comparison with other countries, employment in the scientific and pedagogical area, the perception of the research fellow, and the obstacles that arise in the process of writing the thesis. The empirical basis of the study is a survey conducted in 2019–2020. The sample consisted of 149 people. It is noted that in general, future candidates of sciences tend to get into the research environment to continue working as full-fledged researchers. The analysis also showed that despite the good funding, there are certain problems in the field of science that concern the current generation of PhD students.

Factor analysis of trends for national innovation-driven development

The global innovation trends involve ever new and more flexible systems for the development of industries, goods, and services. The consumer ability of society creates stable needs for new state-of-the-art goods, technologies, and products. Within this context, the need to develop innovations as a way to achieve market demands can hardly be overestimated. The article includes an overview of a number of important innovation-based factors, such as the share of domestic spending on research and development in GDP in the Russian Federation, domestic current spending on research and development in the Russian Federation, the overall level of innovative activity of industrial organizations, etc. Besides, following the study, it was found that the overall level of innovative activity of industrial organizations has a direct notable correlation dependence on domestic current spending on research and development.

PRIMARY HEALTH CARE IN NIGERIA: AN APPRAISAL OF THE EFFECT OF FOREIGN DONATIONS

Primary Health Care (PHC) provides the most viable route towards achieving health related sustainable development goals (SDGs) and is crucial to the achievement of other SDGs. Given the importance of primary health care, nations across the world devote considerable effort and resources towards establishing and maintaining effective PHC systems. In Nigeria, domestic spending on the health sector has been declining while foreign donations towards improving primary health care have been on the increase. However, recent global trends and the imminent expiry of deadlines for a number of foreign donations point toward a not too distant future without foreign donations for health care system improvements. This constitutes a development challenge. Even though foreign donations have yielded some positive health outcomes, the effect of foreign donations on the primary health care system is unclear. The study set out to examine the amount and effect of foreign donations on the primary health care system in Nigeria. The paper combined qualitative methodology and analysis of literature to investigate the present state of primary healthcare, identify the setbacks to full development of primary healthcare in Nigeria and examined the effects of foreign donations on the primary health care system in Nigeria. The paper found that foreign donations have been increasing but have also led to the perpetuation of a non-committal attitude towards increasing domestic spending on health and the neglect of health system strengthening. Therefore, the paper recommends timely and steady increase in domestic funding for health along with the strengthening of the health system towards creating an effective primary health care system with or without foreign donations.

The Nexus Between Infrastructure and Export: An Empirical Evidence from Pakistan

This research, by using the autoregressive distributive lag method, examines the long- and short-term causal relationship between infrastructure and exports in Pakistan over the period 1990–2017. The empirical results revealed the existence of short- and long-term bi-directional causality concerning infrastructure and export in Pakistan. The results demonstrated that infrastructure strongly improves export in the short and long run. Conversely, export encourages the quality and availability of infrastructure in Pakistan in the long run. Furthermore, this study also uses sub-indices of infrastructure individually as dependent and independent variables. The study result demonstrated that the long- and short-term effects of infrastructure and its sub-indices (transport, electricity, communication, finance) on export is positive and significant. Also, when infrastructure sub-indices are used as dependent variables, the results indicate that the effect of export on sub-indices is positive and significant in the long run; however, in the short run, it is insignificant. The bi-directional linkage between infrastructure and export suggests that improving the quality and increasing the availability of infrastructure would enable Pakistan’s economy to catch up with the advanced economies, specifically in export. Furthermore, control variables of per-capita GDP, exchange rates, human capital, and domestic spending also expand the bi-directional causal relationship between Pakistan’s infrastructure and exports.

Guns and Butter in China: How Chinese Citizens Respond to Military Spending

Militaries are sustained by public money that is diverted away from other domestic ends. How the public react to the “guns-versus-butter” trade-off is thus an important question in understanding the microfoundations of Chinese military power. However, there are few studies on public attitudes towards military spending in China, whose rising power has been a grave concern to many policymakers around the world. We fielded a national online survey to investigate the nature of public support for military spending in China. We find that Chinese citizens support military spending in the abstract, but their support diminishes when considered alongside other domestic spending priorities. We also find that public support for military spending coexists surprisingly with anti-war sentiments and a significant strain of isolationism. In addition, while the conventional wisdom suggests that nationalism moves a state towards bellicosity and war, we find that Chinese citizens with a stronger sense of national pride report stronger anti-war sentiments than other citizens.

Rising risks may threaten China’s steady GDP slowdown

Subject China growth outlook. Significance The statement accompanying the second-quarter national accounts that the National Bureau of Statistics released on July 14 describe a “complex and grave” situation amid rising “uncertainties". However, although the second quarter growth was the weakest since 1992 and export-orientated activity was weak, domestic spending is improving. Retail sales rose to a 15-month high of 9.9% year-on-year in June, fixed investment gained 5.8% in January-June, up from 5.6% in January-May and the services purchasing managers index continues to expand solidly, close to its historic average. Impacts The US conflict could help productivity by raising the urgency of the policy drive to support tech, innovation and higher quality growth. The ultimate impact of tariffs depends on substitution choices and the sectoral and regional composition of future tariffs or concessions. A property market collapse is unlikely but faster demographic ageing and slower growth and urbanisation will hit demand in the longer term.

Funding patterns of bibliometrics research

To identify research funding patterns behind bibliometrics as a rapidly expanding science was the aim of the study presented in this paper. We analysed funding information of 8,622 bibliometric papers harvested from Web of Science, among which 1,786 (20.7%) were Papers with Reported Funding (PRFs). The trend in number of PRFs funding in last five years was positive. The most productive countries in PRFs` production were China, the USA and the UK. The same countries were also the most prolific regarding how many times they were mentioned in funding acknowledgements. The number of PRFs published per country was related with OECD reported Gross Domestic Spending on R&D for 2015. There was a significant correlation between number of PRFs per country and the number of all bibliometric papers per country. Far the most prolific funding agency was National Natural Science Foundation of China, followed by the European Commission and the USAs National Science Foundation. The Research trend and direction prediction is the most prolific research theme regarding the percent of PRF and thus most likely to get funded

Baumol's cost disease and the withering of the state

Most theories of government growth place nearly exclusive attention on real changes in public sector activity. Yet, much nominal post–WWII government spending growth was not in the form of the public sector doing more relative to the general economy (real growth), but in the form of government activities becoming relatively more expensive (cost growth). Baumol's (1967) “cost disease” model is our best guide to understanding cost growth, but over time, Baumol has offered conflicting hypotheses about how cost growth bears on real growth. Using 1947–2012 U.S. data, we test these hypotheses, along with a more novel expectation, by modifying Berry and Lowery's (1987b) econometric models of real growth in public purchases and transfers to consider the influence of government cost growth on real public domestic spending.