The impacts on informal financing strategy of small and micro enterprises by interest rate risks and public health emergencies

Informal finance is a crucial financing method for small and micro enterprises (SMEs) in most developing countries. Interest rate risks (IRS) should be a vital component of SMEs' informal finance strategies (IFS), and public health emergencies (as COVID-19) is likely to modify IFS due to increased liquidity risks for SMEs. This article examines the relationship between IRS and IFS and its moderated effects by COVID-19. The study develops a structural equation model of SMEs' IFS to investigate SMEs' IFS, the causal relationship between IRS and SMEs' IFS, mediator effects of SMEs' corporate financial status and regional financial and economic conditions, and moderating effects of SMEs' variables. The empirical data is from Wenzhou, China, distributed between 2016 and 2021. The study concludes that IFS will continue to be a financing technique for Chinese SMEs, even if it may have a deterrent effect due to COVID-19. Additionally, there is a strong positive causal association between IFS and SMEs' IRS, as well as moderator and mediator effects. Recommendations for government policy include clarifying the connection between SMEs' IFS and influencing variables, providing scientific and methodical analysis tools for evaluating factors impacting SMEs' IFS, and encouraging the optimization and upgrading of SMEs' IFS.

The Relationship between Mustard Import and COVID-19 Deaths: A Workflow with Cross-Country Text Mining.

We developed a workflow for the search and screening of natural products by drawing from worldwide experiences shared by online platform users, illustrated how to cope with COVID-19 with a text-mining approach, and statistically tested the natural product identified. We built a knowledge base, which consists of three ontologies pertaining to 7653 narratives. Mustard emerged from texting mining and knowledge engineering as an important candidate relating to COVID-19 outcomes. The findings indicate that, after controlling for the containment index, the net import of mustard is related with reduced total and new deaths of COVID-19 for the non-vaccination time period, with considerable effect size (>0.2).