Probing into Economic Development Studies in the Post-COVID Era

Unfortunately, despite the international community's efforts to combat poverty and inequality, both parameters have been on the rise recently. [...]there is a strong need to find a workable (and appropriate in these new conditions) resolution to poverty problems to avoid a global crisis. The new reality of poverty and inequality issues should be addressed by studying global income disparities and possible ways to bridge gaps between poorer and wealthier countries (and people within countries) by promoting innovations, technologies, human capital development, agrarian systems, and social entrepreneurship. The particular focus should be made on the new challenges to sustainable development brought by the growth of global environmental and public health problems, such as climate change, deterioration of air, water, land, and other resources, reduction of biodiversity, and loss of many natural ecosystems.

The Impact of Foreign Capital Inflows on Agriculture Development and Poverty Reduction: Panel Data Analysis for Developing Countries

Combating poverty through the development of agricultural production and providing rural people with new employment and income opportunities in agriculture has become one of the major concerns of both policymakers and scholars worldwide. In many developing countries, government policies have failed to achieve the desired poverty alleviation goals due to the lack of financial resources. Despite that, few comprehensive studies have so far unambiguously identified the effects of the exogenous factor of capital inflows on the level of poverty and agriculture development. In this paper, the authors attempt to shed light on the poverty–agriculture–capital trilemma pattern by revealing the impacts of different types of capital inflows on the parameters of poverty reduction and agriculture development. The panel unit root test and pool mean group estimation techniques were employed for observing the short-term and long-term linkages between dependent and explanatory variables across fourteen developing economies of Latin America, Asia, and Eastern Europe. It was revealed that poverty reduction could be positively affected by an increase in the values of agricultural exports, foreign direct investment, foreign development assistance, and remittances received from migrant workers. The level of agriculture could be improved by deeper integration of developing economies to global food supply chains as either suppliers or consumers of food and agricultural products.

The Supply of Calories, Proteins, and Fats in Low-Income Countries: A Four-Decade Retrospective Study.

Over the past decades, both the quantity and quality of food supply for millions of people have improved substantially in the course of economic growth across the developing world. However, the number of undernourished people has resumed growth in the 2010s amid food supply disruptions, economic slowdowns, and protectionist restrictions to agricultural trade. Having been common to most nations, these challenges to the food security status of the population still vary depending on the level of economic development and national income of individual countries. In order to explore the long-run determinants of food supply transformations, this study employs five-stage multiple regression analysis to identify the strengths and directions of effects of agricultural production parameters, income level, price indices, food trade, and currency exchange on supply of calories, proteins, and fats across 11 groups of agricultural products in 1980-2018. To address the diversity of effects across developing nations, the study includes 99 countries of Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa categorized as low-income, lower-middle-income, and upper-middle-income economies. It is found that in low-income countries, food supply parameters are more strongly affected by production factors compared to economic and trade variables. The effect of economic factors on the food supply of higher-value food products, such as meat and dairy products, fruit, and vegetables, increases with the rise in the level of income, but it stays marginal for staples in all three groups of countries. The influence of trade factors on food supply is stronger compared to production and economic parameters in import-dependent economies irrelevant of the gross national income per capita. The approach presented in this paper contributes to the research on how food supply patterns and their determinants evolve in the course of economic transformations in low-income countries.

Has the COVID-19 Pandemic Affected Maritime Connectivity? An Estimation for China and the Polar Silk Road Countries

In light of about 80% of international freight traffic carried by sea, maritime supply chains’ stability is pivotal to global connectivity. For over a year now, the transboundary mobility of vessels and cargoes has been restricted by diverse forms of the COVID-19 containment measures applied by national governments, while the lockdowns of people, businesses, and economic activities have significantly affected the growth prospects of various maritime connectivity initiatives. This study investigates how the pandemic-related public health, trade, and market factors have shifted the connectivity patterns in the Polar Silk Road (PSR) transport corridor between China, South Korea, Japan, Russia, and four economies of Northern Europe. The causality links between the Shipping Connectivity Index (SCI) and the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths, trade volumes with China and the rest of the world, and price indexes of minerals, fuels, food, and agricultural products are revealed separately for eight countries and thirty-five ports. The study algorithm is built on the consecutive application of the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) and the Phillips-Perron (PP) stationarity tests, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method, the Fully-Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) and the Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) robustness checks, and the Toda-Yamamoto causality test. Tight trade-connectivity links are recorded in all locations along the China-PSR transport corridor in 2015–2019, but in 2020, the relationships weakened. Bidirectional influences between the number of COVID-19 cases and connectivity parameters demonstrate the maritime sector’s sensitivity to safety regulations and bring into focus the role of cargo shipping in the transboundary spread of the virus. The authors’ four-stage approach contributes to the establishment of a methodology framework that may equip stakeholders with insights about potential risks to maritime connectivity in the China-PSR maritime trade in the course of the pandemic.

Impacts of COVID-19 on Trade and Economic Aspects of Food Security: Evidence from 45 Developing Countries.

The stability of food supply chains is crucial to the food security of people around the world. Since the beginning of 2020, this stability has been undergoing one of the most vigorous pressure tests ever due to the COVID-19 outbreak. From a mere health issue, the pandemic has turned into an economic threat to food security globally in the forms of lockdowns, economic decline, food trade restrictions, and rising food inflation. It is safe to assume that the novel health crisis has badly struck the least developed and developing economies, where people are particularly vulnerable to hunger and malnutrition. However, due to the recency of the COVID-19 problem, the impacts of macroeconomic fluctuations on food insecurity have remained scantily explored. In this study, the authors attempted to bridge this gap by revealing interactions between the food security status of people and the dynamics of COVID-19 cases, food trade, food inflation, and currency volatilities. The study was performed in the cases of 45 developing economies distributed to three groups by the level of income. The consecutive application of the autoregressive distributed lag method, Yamamoto's causality test, and variance decomposition analysis allowed the authors to find the food insecurity effects of COVID-19 to be more perceptible in upper-middle-income economies than in the least developed countries. In the latter, food security risks attributed to the emergence of the health crisis were mainly related to economic access to adequate food supply (food inflation), whereas in higher-income developing economies, availability-sided food security risks (food trade restrictions and currency depreciation) were more prevalent. The approach presented in this paper contributes to the establishment of a methodology framework that may equip decision-makers with up-to-date estimations of health crisis effects on economic parameters of food availability and access to staples in food-insecure communities.