This paper examines gender disparities in digital financial inclusion in the West Bank and Gaza, situating digital participation within the broader political economy of institutional fragility and economic constraint. Using nationally representative microdata from the 2025 Global Findex database, digital financial inclusion is conceptualized as a multidimensional process encompassing digital account ownership, basic digital payment use, and merchant digital payments. Logit and probit models with robust standard errors are employed to estimate average marginal effects, complemented by interaction models and nonlinear Fairlie decompositions to examine the extent and sources of observed gender gaps. The results reveal sizable gender gaps across all dimensions of digital financial participation. While education, employment, and income are positively associated with financial engagement, these factors do not eliminate women’s disadvantage. Gender disparities remain sizable among respondents with higher education and internet access, while the decomposition shows that observable characteristics explain only part of the gaps. The findings indicate that digital financial exclusion is closely associated with broader gender inequalities in economic participation within a fragile institutional environment.
Environmental protection, as a public good, relies heavily on local government action. This study examines how intergovernmental tax competition and structural fiscal imbalances shape local environmental management. We develop a two-region theoretical model and test its implications using panel data from Chinese provinces. The results show that tax competition enhances environmental management, while vertical fiscal imbalance weakens it. Horizontal fiscal imbalance has heterogeneous effects, promoting environmental management in developed regions but reducing it in underdeveloped regions. These findings are robust to system GMM and spatial econometric specifications. This study contributes by integrating tax competition and fiscal imbalances within a unified framework and providing new evidence on the fiscal determinants of local environmental regulation.
In Italy, as in many European countries, the performing arts (PA) receive public subsidies, raising concerns about the efficient management of companies in this sector, particularly opera houses, which receive about 50
This paper studies how Italian farms adjust when migrant workers become available in a sector facing persistent labor shortages. Using an unbalanced panel of 20,589 farms from the Italian Farm Accountancy Data Network (FADN) for 2012–2021 linked to province-level measures of immigrant presence, we examine whether migrant employment primarily reshapes production structure and land allocation or instead affects factor prices and technology choices. To address endogenous migrant location and farm hiring, we instrument local migrant availability with a shift-share measure based on 1991 settlement patterns interacted with national inflows, and exploit within-farm variation over time. We find that farms employing migrants experience a sizable decline in the share of native workers, but no systematic reduction in native employment levels. Migrant employment raises the value of production in Northern and Southern Italy (including Islands) and induces marked reallocation across crop groups and land use, with heterogeneous patterns across macro-areas. By contrast, we do not detect robust effects on net hourly wages or mechanization proxies. Quality-related responses, measured by certifications, are mixed and region-specific. Overall, the evidence points to adjustment mainly through output composition and farm organization rather than through factor-price changes.
Climate change has been a reality for economies over the past three decades and has fuelled an abundance of literature. In this article, we examine the effects of climate change on inclusive growth from a sample of 38 African countries. Therefore, we specify and estimate a fixed-effects panel data model using the generalised least squares (GLS) method, the Lewbel 2SLS method and the System Generalised Method of Moments (S-GMM) over the period 1995–2021. Several results emerge. First, the results reveal that climate change, as approximated by temperatures and precipitation, significantly reduces inclusive growth. Second, the robustness of the results is confirmed by taking into account migrant remittances, official development assistance, financial development, private investment, and corruption control. Third, the results reveal a U-shaped relationship between climate change, as measured by temperature and precipitation, and inclusive growth. Finally, the results remain stable after taking into account alternative measures of climate change, such as the climate change vulnerability index. We suggest consolidating climate change mitigation strategies to sustain inclusive growth in African countries.
