This paper uses four ADF-type unit root tests and four KPSS-type stationarity tests to examine whether the gender unemployment gap would converge to zero in Africa. Among these different tests, the two most restricted models, namely the ADF test and the KPSS test, indicate no convergence in the...

At the end of the 1990s, the Japanese government distributed annually more than US$10 billion as foreign aid directly or indirectly to developing countries. Japan’s ODA can be divided into the following four groups: 1) Bilateral Grants, 2) Technical Co-operation, 3) Multilateral Aid, and 4)...

West African countries have long advocated efforts to promote economic integration and income convergence. In recent trends, Nigeria records the highest GDP in nominal value, yet its neighbouring countries are yet to catch up in terms of both GDP growth rate and GDP per capita growth rate. The...

This paper proposes a new causality test or a Fisher-type causality test to examine empirically the export-growth nexus. To empirically demonstrate this new causality test procedure, the Fisher causality test is used to examine the exports-growth nexus in four Asian economies, namely Indonesia,...

This paper proposes a nonlinear unit root test based on the artificial neural network-augmented Dickey-Fuller (ANN-ADF) test for testing hysteresis in unemployment. In this new unit root test, the linear, quadratic and cubic components of the neural network process are used to capture the...

This paper suggests a new testing procedure to systematically examine the middle-income trap (MIT). To empirically demonstrate this procedure, one high income and 14 middle-income countries are examined using newly developed unit root tests - Fourier ADF with structural break (FADF-SB) and...

This paper examines energy and agricultural commodities' short-run and long-run connectedness by using the Time-varying parameter vector autoregressions (TVP-VAR). It applies the frequency version of the TVP-VAR model, which is a modified version of the dynamic TVP-VAR model. The frequency...

The introduction of the ODA Charter in 1992 can be seen as Japan’s official pledge to pay more attention to political conditions in recipient countries and to impose political conditionalities on them. However, in practice, the Japanese government has continued using foreign aid as a...

This paper examines Japan’s aid sanctions policy toward African countries since new guidelines for Japanese ODA were introduced. There were three cases of positive reinforcement in Africa, i.e. in Madagascar, Zambia) and Guinea. Also, the Japanese government implemented nine negative...

The Japanese government introduced new foreign aid guidelines in 1991 and it pledged to impose aid sanctions on those aid recipient countries whose governments violated human rights or democratic principles. The introduction of the new aid guidelines is expected to produce a certain effect on...