This study investigates the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) financing in Uzbekistan's reforming economic environment. Despite rising FDI inflows and growing engagement with Islamic development finance, their interplay in Uzbekistan remains insufficiently examined. The analysis employs econometric modelling based on cointegration, using annual time-series data from 2003 to 2023 on FDI net inflows and annual approved financing from the IsDB. Given the still-limited development of Islamic finance in Uzbekistan, IsDB financing is used as a narrow institutional proxy for Sharia-compliant development finance rather than as a measure of the full Islamic finance ecosystem. The results indicate a positive and statistically significant long-run relationship between FDI inflows and IsDB financing. However, due to the limited effective sample size in the ECM estimation and the narrow proxy used, the results should be interpreted as exploratory evidence of association rather than causality.
This study examines how external economic integration relates to growth across five Central Asian economies - Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan - between 2019 and 2024. Using a panel rebuilt from World Bank indicators and country fixed-effects estimation, it tests whether foreign direct investment (FDI), trade openness, remittances, and urban growth account for post-pandemic growth performance. The results show no broad integration dividend: FDI, remittances, and urban growth are each unrelated to growth, and only trade openness is positively associated, modestly and without robustness to sample composition. Growth is instead governed by stable, country-level structural conditions that distinguish resource-based from labour-exporting economies. Interpreted through the regional development-trap framework, these findings indicate that integration reproduces rather than narrows structural divergence, and that its absence of a supranational redistributive mechanism sustains the trap. The paper extends development-trap theory from the sub-national to the national scale in post-socialist contexts.
This paper provides an ex-ante assessment of the macroeconomic effects of euro adoption in Bulgaria, a post-communist EU member state with a long-standing currency board. Using an annual panel of European economies over 1995-2024, the analysis exploits the staggered timing of euro adoption across Central and Eastern Europe and applies difference-in-differences and event-study methods to estimate the effects of euro-area entry. The results indicate that euro adoption is associated with statistically and economically significant average improvements in income convergence and substantial reductions in sovereign borrowing costs, while effects on trade integration with the euro area are limited. Event-study estimates suggest that convergence gains materialise gradually following adoption, whereas improvements in sovereign financing conditions occur more rapidly. Overall, the findings suggest that the effects of euro adoption in hard-peg economies operate predominantly through financial and institutional channels, rather than through trade expansion or shifts in monetary policy.
This paper investigates the impact of global and domestic energy prices on inflation in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries over the period 2000-2022. Using quarterly data, we estimate long-run relationships through ARDL and NARDL models under alternative sets of control variables. Quantile regression analysis is employed to examine whether the inflationary effects of energy prices vary across different inflation levels. The results show that domestic energy prices have a stronger effect on inflation than global energy prices. While linear ARDL models capture the dynamics adequately in some cases, the findings provide strong evidence of asymmetric inflation responses to energy price movements, which are better explained by NARDL specifications. Positive energy price shocks exert a larger impact on inflation than negative shocks. Furthermore, the influence of energy prices on inflation is more pronounced during periods of elevated inflation.
