Hasil untuk "Regional economics. Space in economics"

Jason Hartline

A fundamental challenge for modern economics is to understand what happens when actors in an economy are replaced with algorithms. Like rationality has enabled understanding of outcomes of classical economic actors, no-regret can enable the understanding of outcomes of algorithmic actors. This review article covers the classical computer science literature on no-regret algorithms to provide a foundation for an overview of the latest economics research on no-regret algorithms, focusing on the emerging topics of manipulation, statistical inference, and algorithmic collusion.

Sihan Qian, Amit Mehra, Dengpan Liu

The rise of foundation models has driven the emergence of AI supply chains, where upstream foundation model providers offer fine-tuning and inference services to downstream firms developing domain-specific applications. Downstream firms pay providers to use their computing infrastructure to fine-tune models with proprietary data, creating a co-creation dynamic that enhances model quality. Amid concerns that foundation model providers and downstream firms may capture excessive consumer surplus, along with increasing regulatory measures, this study employs a game-theoretic model involving a provider and two competing downstream firms to analyze how policy interventions affect consumer surplus in the AI supply chain. Our analysis shows that policies promoting price competition in downstream markets (i.e., pro-price-competitive policies) boost consumer surplus only when compute or data preprocessing costs are high, while compute subsidies are effective only when these costs are low, suggesting these policies complement each other. In contrast, policies promoting quality competition in downstream markets (i.e., pro-quality-competitive policies) always improve consumer surplus. We also find that under pro-price-competitive policies or compute subsidies, both the provider and downstream firms can achieve higher profits along with greater consumer surplus, creating a win-win-win outcome. However, pro-quality-competitive policies increase the provider's profits while reducing those of downstream firms. Finally, as compute costs decline, pro-price-competitive policies may lose their effectiveness, whereas compute subsidies may shift from ineffective to effective. These findings offer insights for policymakers seeking to foster AI supply chains that are economically efficient and socially beneficial.

Cristian Espinal Maya

This paper establishes the theoretical and practical foundations for using Large Language Models (LLMs) as measurement instruments for latent economic variables -- specifically variables that describe the cognitive content of occupational tasks at a level of granularity not achievable with existing survey instruments. I formalize four conditions under which LLM-generated scores constitute valid instruments: semantic exogeneity, construct relevance, monotonicity, and model invariance. I then apply this framework to the Augmented Human Capital Index (AHC_o), constructed from 18,796 O*NET task statements scored by Claude Haiku 4.5, and validated against six existing AI exposure indices. The index shows strong convergent validity (r = 0.85 with Eloundou GPT-gamma, r = 0.79 with Felten AIOE) and discriminant validity. Principal component analysis confirms that AI-related occupational measures span two distinct dimensions -- augmentation and substitution. Inter-rater reliability across two LLM models (n = 3,666 paired scores) yields Pearson r = 0.76 and Krippendorff's alpha = 0.71. Prompt sensitivity analysis across four alternative framings shows that task-level rankings are robust. Obviously Related Instrumental Variables (ORIV) estimation recovers coefficients 25% larger than OLS, consistent with classical measurement error attenuation. The methodology generalizes beyond labor economics to any domain where semantic content must be quantified at scale.

Kylie Goodwin, Mengyu Li, T. Wiedmann

Australia is a highly urbanised country, with over 85% of people living in city environments, so the lifestyles of city dwellers and the infrastructure of cities are critical to addressing sustainability issues. Australian cities have embraced the Doughnut Economics framework for sustainability; however, methodologies and data to comprehensively assess environmental and social sustainability are underdeveloped and locally focused, undermining the effectiveness of targets set. This research compares social outcomes of capital cities and regional areas within Australia with 12 environmental stressors and shows that consumption-based, environmental footprints are between 1.7 and 44 times higher than global averages. The most critical environmental issue is biodiversity loss within Australia while the most critical social issues are living standards in remote and regional communities, and inequality. The sustainability challenges for different actors, planetary boundaries, and economic sectors in Australia vary substantially, especially when viewed from a consumption rather than a production perspective.

Saiful Anwar, Ega Rusanti, Dewi Rahmawati Maulidiyah

This study aims to examine whether the adoption of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Standards enhances carbon emission disclosure among banks in Indonesia. Furthermore, it provides empirical evidence that the presence of women on boards moderates the relationship between GRI adoption and carbon emission disclosure. The study was conducted on 40 conventional and Islamic banks listed on the Indonesia Stock Exchange (IDX) during the period 2015–2021. The analysis employs Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) regression, with robustness tests conducted using alternative measurement variables to ensure the consistency of the results. The findings consistently demonstrate that the adoption of GRI Standards positively influences carbon emission disclosure in Indonesian banks. The presence of women on boards promotes banks’ engagement in global climate change agendas, aligning with the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 5, 8, and 13. This study reinforces stakeholder theory and Critical Mass Theory, indicating that a minimum threshold of female board members is necessary to influence strategic decisions, particularly in encouraging voluntary disclosures such as carbon emission reporting. Notably, the study also finds that carbon emission disclosure is valued by banking stakeholders in Indonesia. Therefore, policymakers are encouraged to establish regulations that mandate GRI adoption and ensure a minimum representation of women in strategic decision-making positions within the banking sector.

Tariq Eldakruri, Edip Senyurek

This paper investigates the economic feasibility of replacing human labor with robotics and automation in Qatar's manufacturing and service sectors. By analyzing labor costs, productivity gains, and implementation expenses, the study assesses the potential financial impact and return on investment of robotic integration. Results indicate the sectors where automation is economically viable and identify challenges related to workforce adaptation, policy, and infrastructure. These insights provide guidance for policymakers and industry stakeholders considering automation strategies in Qatar.

Ali Zeytoon-Nejad

This paper presents a novel quantitative approach for comparative economic studies, addressing limitations in current classification methods. Conventional approaches in comparative economics often rely on ad hoc and categorical classifications, leading to subjective judgments and disregarding the continuous nature of the spectrum of economic systems. These can result in subjectivity and significant information loss, particularly for countries with systems near categorical borders. To overcome these shortcomings, the present paper proposes distance-based indices for objective categorization, considering economic foundations and using hard data. Accordingly, the paper introduces institutional similarity indices--Capitalism Similarity Index (CapSI), Communism Similarity Index (ComSI), and Socialism Similarity Index (SocSI)-which reflect countries' positions along the economic system continuum. These indices adhere to mathematical rigor and are grounded in the mathematical fields of real analysis, metric spaces, and distance functions. By classifying 135 countries and creating GIS maps, the practical applicability of the proposed approach is demonstrated. Results show a high explanatory power of the introduced indices, suggesting their beneficial usage in comparative economic studies. The paper advocates for their adoption due to their objectivity and ability to capture structural and institutional nuances without subjective judgments while also considering the continuous nature of the spectrum of economic systems.

Yhlas Sovbetov, Mohamed Moussa

This paper studies the macroeconomic impact of economic freedom on foreign direct investments inflows in both global and regional panel analyses involving 156 countries through the period of 1995-2016. Unlike to prior literature, it includes often neglected nations such as Fragile and Conflict-Affected states, Sub-Saharan, Oceanian, and Post-Soviet countries. The paper finds a positive impact of economic freedom on FDI under fixed-effects model in global case where a unit change in economic freedom scales FDI inflows up to 1.15 units. More specifically, all 9 regions also refer to positive and significant impact of economic freedom on FDI. The highest impact is recorded in European countries, whereas the lowest ones are documented in Fragile-Conflict affected states, Sub-Saharan zone, and Oceanian countries.

Ali Zeytoon-Nejad

Business growth is a goal of great importance for its both private and social benefits. Many firms view business growth as an imperative for their survival, stability, and long-term success. Business growth can be socially beneficial, too, as it enables businesses to expand into new territories where they can stimulate economic growth and development, creates more jobs, increase living standards, and better serve their communities by giving back more through Corporate Social Responsibility initiatives. Business growth must be planned reasonably and optimally so that it can effectively achieve its critical ambitions in business practice. The current common practices for planning the supply side of business growth are usually ad-hoc and lack well-established mathematical and economic foundations. The present paper argues that business growth planning can be pursued more structurally, reliably, and meaningfully within the framework of Growth Accounting (GA), which was first introduced by Economics Nobel Laureate Robert Solow to study economic growth. It is shown that, although GA was initially put forth as a procedure to explain "economic growth" ex-post, it can similarly be used to plan "business growth" ex-ante when a general backward approach is taken in its procedure-called Backward Growth Accounting (BGA) in this paper. Taking this well-established economic-mathematical approach to planning business growth will enhance the current practices conceptually and structurally, as it is built on the basis of economic logic and mathematical tools. BGA can help businesses identify and plan for key drivers of output growth and assess shortcomings in the growth process, such as poor productivity, inadequate labor utilization, or insufficient capital investment. The paper outlines an eight-step procedure for planning business growth using BGA and includes appendices with real-world examples.

Kristi Govella

ABSTRACT As an emerging space power, how is South Korea engaging with the regional institutional architecture of outer space cooperation in the Indo-Pacific region? This article argues that South Korea’s institutional strategies have been influenced by economic opportunities, security interests, and institutional characteristics. Due to these factors, South Korea has focused its engagement on the Japan-led Asia-Pacific Regional Space Agency Forum (APRSAF), and it is considering new opportunities in minilateral dialogs with the US and its allies and partners. In contrast, South Korea has not joined the China-led Asia-Pacific Space Cooperation Organization (APSCO), and it has shown limited or no interest in two other regional space science and technology education institutions led by India and China respectively.

Jan E. Snellman, Rafael A. Barrio, K. Kaski et al.

Epidemics, apart from affecting the health of populations, can have large impacts on their social and economic behavior and subsequently feed back to and influence the spreading of the disease. This calls for systematic investigation which factors affect significantly and either beneficially or adversely the disease spreading and regional socio-economics. Based on our recently developed hybrid agent-based socio-economy and epidemic spreading model we perform extensive exploration of its six-dimensional parameter space of the socio-economic part of the model, namely, the attitudes towards the spread of the pandemic, health and the economic situation for both, the population and government agents who impose regulations. We search for significant patterns from the resulting simulated data using basic classification tools, such as self-organizing maps and principal component analysis, and we monitor different quantities of the model output, such as infection rates, the propagation speed of the epidemic, economic activity, government regulations, and the compliance of population on government restrictions. Out of these, the ones describing the epidemic spreading were resulting in the most distinctive clustering of the data, and they were selected as the basis of the remaining analysis. We relate the found clusters to three distinct types of disease spreading: wave-like, chaotic, and transitional spreading patterns. The most important value parameter contributing to phase changes and the speed of the epidemic was found to be the compliance of the population agents towards the government regulations. We conclude that in compliant populations, the infection rates are significantly lower and the infection spreading is slower, while the population agents’ health and economical attitudes show a weaker effect.

Kasprzyk Beata

The subject-matter and aim of this paper is to present the extent of poverty and economic and social exclusion in the countries of the European Union (EU-27). The specific aim is the comparative assessment and reduction of these processes between 2011 and 2022.

Sebastian T. Braun, Jan Stuhler

Despite millions of war widows worldwide, little is known about the economic consequences of being widowed by war. We use life history data from West Germany to show that war widowhood increased women's employment immediately after World War II but led to lower employment rates later in life. War widows, therefore, carried a double burden of employment and childcare while their children were young but left the workforce when their children reached adulthood. We show that the design of compensation policies likely explains this counterintuitive life-cycle pattern and examine potential spillovers to the next generation.

Victor M. Yakovenko

This article is a supplement to my main contribution to the Routledge Handbook of Complexity Economics (2023). On the basis of three recent papers, it presents an unconventional perspective on economic inequality from a statistical physics point of view. One section demonstrates empirical evidence for the exponential distribution of income in 67 countries around the world. The exponential distribution was not familiar to mainstream economists until it was introduced by physicists by analogy with the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution of energy and subsequently confirmed in empirical data for many countries. Another section reviews the two-class structure of income distribution in the USA. While the exponential law describes the majority of population (the lower class), the top tail of income distribution (the upper class) is characterized by the Pareto power law, and there is no clearly defined middle class in between. As a result, the whole distribution can be very well fitted by using only three parameters. Historical evolution of these parameters and inequality trends are analyzed from 1983 to 2018. Finally, global inequality in energy consumption and CO2 emissions per capita is studied using the empirical data from 1980 to 2017. Global inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient G, has been decreasing until around 2010, but then saturated at the level G=0.5. The saturation at this level was theoretically predicted on the basis of the maximal entropy principle, well before the slowdown of the global inequality decrease became visible in the data. This effect is attributed to accelerated mixing of the world economy due to globalization, which brings it to the state of maximal entropy and thus results in global economic stagnation. This observation has profound consequences for social and geopolitical stability and the efforts to deal with the climate change.

Oleg V. Pavlov, Jason M. Sardell

This chapter develops a feedback economic model that explains the rise of the Sicilian mafia in the 19th century. Grounded in economic theory, the model incorporates causal relationships between the mafia activities, predation, law enforcement, and the profitability of local businesses. Using computational experiments with the model, we explore how different factors and feedback effects impact the mafia activity levels. The model explains important historical observations such as the emergence of the mafia in wealthier regions and its absence in the poorer districts despite the greater levels of banditry.

ila Ceren VARIS HUSAR, M. Husar, V. Ondrejicka

The effect of the time and space on people and the knowledge production is examined with various methods and approaches in different disciplines as economics, geography, development studies, planning and the like. From the socio-spatial perspective, regional development is related in one dimension of how the individual links to one’s environment, both individually and within a community. This research is a part of a wider research project, called REGINNO 1 delves into the regional innovation capacity in Slovakia, specifically explores the interrelation of human agency and local development from the socio-spatial perspective specific to capital city of Bratislava. Human agency refers to the individuals’ capacity and perspective to be involved in the creation of novel ideas and contribution to local knowledge. The socio-spatial perspective acknowledges the interplay between social structures and spatial arrangements, exploring the role of physical environments shape social relations and opportunities for the aforementioned individuals. Human capital capacity fosters a favourable setting for innovation by enabling the sharing of knowledge and resources, and facilitating the formation of networks and partnerships. Based on the findings of this research, there are a number of recommendations of this research for policymakers, and practitioners to foster environments, spaces and planning strategies that empower individuals, promote inclusion, and address socio-spatial diversities in local context.

Y. Yegorov

Arvind Panagariya

This paper examines two aspects of the digitalization of finance in India, which has been surprisingly robust and fast growing. Much of this success is due to the government's introduction of a biometric identity known as Aadhaar. Because financial transactions require definitive proof of identity of the transacting parties, Aadhaar provides this proof without any document via biometric verification, thus greatly facilitating electronic transactions. The paper also documents the impact of digital financialization by showing examples of entrepreneurship, both directly in the fintech space through the creation of new web-based services as well as the rise of new businesses that make use of the fintech infrastructure that has been created.

Daniel Levy, Avichai Snir

Recent studies in psychology and neuroscience offer systematic evidence that fictional works exert a surprisingly strong influence on readers and have the power to shape their opinions and worldviews. Building on these findings, we study what we term Potterian economics, the economic ideas, insights, and structure, found in Harry Potter books, to assess how the books might affect economic literacy. A conservative estimate suggests that more than 7.3 percent of the world population has read the Harry Potter books, and millions more have seen their movie adaptations. These extraordinary figures underscore the importance of the messages the books convey. We explore the Potterian economic model and compare it to professional economic models to assess the consistency of the Potterian economic principles with the existing economic models. We find that some of the principles of Potterian economics are consistent with economists models. Many other principles, however, are distorted and contain numerous inaccuracies, contradicting professional economists views and insights. We conclude that Potterian economics can teach us about the formation and dissemination of folk economics, the intuitive notions of naive individuals who see market transactions as a zero-sum game, who care about distribution but fail to understand incentives and efficiency, and who think of prices as allocating wealth but not resources or their efficient use.

William A. Masters, Amelia B. Finaret, Steven A. Block

Rapid increases in food supplies have reduced global hunger, while rising burdens of diet-related disease have made poor diet quality the leading cause of death and disability around the world. Today's "double burden" of undernourishment in utero and early childhood then undesired weight gain and obesity later in life is accompanied by a third less visible burden of micronutrient imbalances. The triple burden of undernutrition, obesity, and unbalanced micronutrients that underlies many diet-related diseases such as diabetes, hypertension and other cardiometabolic disorders often coexist in the same person, household and community. All kinds of deprivation are closely linked to food insecurity and poverty, but income growth does not always improve diet quality in part because consumers cannot directly or immediately observe the health consequences of their food options, especially for newly introduced or reformulated items. Even after direct experience and epidemiological evidence reveals relative risks of dietary patterns and nutritional exposures, many consumers may not consume a healthy diet because food choice is driven by other factors. This chapter reviews the evidence on dietary transition and food system transformation during economic development, drawing implications for how research and practice in agricultural economics can improve nutritional outcomes.