Towards Eco-Friendly Responsibilities

Attempts to fulfil the contemporary needs mainly on strengthening eco-friendly responsibilities are in line with the strategic role of expanding committed awareness of sustaining the healthy community. This initiative should bring along with enhancing the duties on how educational institution can manage its role in the balance between human being and natural resources. As such, the innovative learning culture in enabling the school approach in empowering sustainability should be taken into consideration in strengthening multi-task for sustainable communities. This paper aims to examine the eco-friendly responsibilities to enhance the healthy community through cross reviewing Indonesian field school model. With the critical review of literature from referred journals, books, and conferences, the theoretical framework model with a guideline will be offered to assist in the innovative learning culture to strengthen its play in bringing environmental and social responsibilities in line with sustainability goal achievement program.

China’s Shifting Labor-intensive Manufacturing Firms to Africa with A Particular Focus on Ethiopia and Rwanda

The paper aims to bring attention to the vital phenomenon of China’s factory relocation to Africa, with a special focus on Ethiopia and Rwanda. As such, the paper asks: can the surge in wages in China decisively lead to the relocation of labor-intensive manufacturing firms from China to Ethiopia and Rwanda on a scale substantially sufficient to kick-start their industrialization? In attempting to answer the question, the paper also attempts to find out if there can be any possible shift from Asian to African Geese formation within the context of flying geese (FG) theory of comparative advantage, a framework that is useful in understanding the concept of “catching-up economy”, relaying as the paper general analytical framework. The paper finds out that China’s factory relocation are still limited and constrained, owing to both African nations and China’s side factors.

China's Infrastructure Financing and the Role of Infrastructure in Awakening African Economies

African economies, through Agenda 2063, recognize that developing infrastructure – transport, electricity, energy, water, and e-connectivity – will be critical for the region to assume a lasting place in the global economic system. As a result, this paper addresses the continent’s infrastructure gap and provides an important insight into the rapidly growing presence of China’s official infrastructure financing in Africa as well as the distinctive character of its involvement. In addition, the paper provides an empirical evaluation of the role of infrastructure in awakening African economies. The generalized-method-of-moments (GMM) estimator for dynamic models of panel data developed by Arellano and Bond (1991), and Arellano and Bover (1995) was employed to estimate an infrastructure-increased growth model.

Harnessing the Demographic Dividend in Africa Through Lessons From East Asia's Experience

Notably, East Asian Economies successfully capitalized on shifts in their age structures to gain a boost in economic productivity, a phenomenon known as the demographic dividend. Nowadays, despite the hitherto sluggish pace of Africa’s transition, experts remain optimistic that similar transformation in Africa may lead to faster development in coming decades. The paper attempts to answer the following three questions: (i) Can natural resource development help African economies harness its demographic dividend? (ii) as China forty years long, demographic dividend draws to an end, China is actively trying to capture fresh economic opportunities in higher-value-added productive activity. Can Africa seize this opportunity provided by its own emerging demographic dividend era? (iii) Can imitation game help African economies harness its demographic dividend? Arguably, for African economies to imitate the East Asian miracle and harness a maximum demographic dividend, they should adhere to these three mechanisms: labor supply, savings, and human capital.

China’s Infrastructure Financing and the Role of Infrastructure in Awakening African Economies

African economies, through Agenda 2063, recognize that developing infrastructure – transport, electricity, energy, water, and e-connectivity – will be critical for the region to assume a lasting place in the global economic system. As a result, this paper addresses the continent’s infrastructure gap and provides an important insight into the rapidly growing presence of China’s official infrastructure financing in Africa as well as the distinctive character of its involvement. In addition, the paper provides an empirical evaluation of the role of infrastructure in awakening African economies. The generalized-method-of-moments (GMM) estimator for dynamic models of panel data developed by Arellano and Bond (1991), and Arellano and Bover (1995) was employed to estimate an infrastructure-increased growth model.

Decision Making as a Contributor for Women Empowerment

As per United Nations Development Program's Human Development Report 2016, India ranks 131 out of 188 countries on the gender inequality index, which positions it in the medium category. Women need intervention at various levels and the role of decision making at different spheres is a critical part of it. A major facet of empowerment is equal contribution of women in decision making, irrespective of any constraint of relatives or societal norms. This study measures the status of women's decision-making power in different areas like household, economic freedom, children, society, and awareness of their rights. It includes a survey of 278 women from the lower economic stratum in urban India. It further involves construction of empowerment indices on different decision-making indicators and hypothesis testing using statistical tests like independent sample t-test, ANOVA test. The findings in the Indian context are compared with other parts of the world. The survey results reported are of high social and policy importance for Indian women.

Working Poor in Decommodification Between Belgium and China

The research uses a comparative analysis framework to interpret the multiple commodification processes for the working poor, which consists of research tropisms from a macro-sight system and from the internal mechanism and proceeding course of the social security system. Based on this framework, the authors try to establish an ideal type with a universal explanatory power to reveal the impact of cross-national diversity on social security systems in the decommodification process among poor female workers. The research also examines the extent to which such differences ever existed between Belgium and China in empirical terms.

Identifying Forward and Backward Linkages From China's Infrastructure Investment in Africa

The continent of Africa must industrialize to eradicate poverty and create jobs for its 12 million African youth who join its workforce yearly. One of the major factors hindering industrialization has been the insufficient stock of productive infrastructure that would permit companies to thrive in industries with robust comparative advantage. Within the context of Africa-China cooperation, China has emerged as a key partner to several African nations, including financing as well as constructing large-scale infrastructure projects. With emphasis on the Tazara railway, Mombasa-Nairobi railway, and Ghana Bui hydropower dam, this paper employs backward and forward linkages theory to investigate what role these three Chinese-led infrastructure projects play in African infrastructure development and what the infrastructure investment leads to concerning creating new opportunities and businesses for Africa. The paper discovers that these three Chinese-led infrastructure projects have multiple gains and linkages for and beyond the three various projects areas. Above all, these three Chinese-led infrastructure projects were seen by the Chinese government to fulfil its goals in Africa.

Capital Account Liberalization and Capital Movement in China

Capital account liberalization has always been at the core of economic policymaking. China is a country which has chosen to go gradual in opening up the capital account. The present research seeks to manoeuvre aspects of capital account liberalization for the Chinese economy. An empirical investigation is run for ascertaining the particular influence capital controls has had on foreign direct investment in China which has outpaced other capital flows in the past decades. The model applied involves foreign direct investment inflows as the dependent variable while four variables are independent. The stationarity of the univariate series is checked with the use of Augmented Dicky Fuller test. The study concludes with theoretical understanding that full liberalization of the current account in China has overall benefited the economy. The outcome of the study suggests that there is no significant bearing of current account liberalization on foreign direct inflows.