This paper examines whether fixed broadband penetration, an enabler of technological globalization, exhibits a nonlinear relationship with income inequality and whether institutional quality conditions this relationship. Using an unbalanced panel of 164 countries over the period 1998 to 2024, estimated with two-way fixed effects and country-clustered standard errors, the analysis finds that broadband penetration is associated with income inequality in a U-shaped pattern. At low penetration levels, broadband expansion is associated with lower disposable income inequality, consistent with information democratization and market access channels; beyond a turning point of approximately 9.95 subscriptions per 100 people, further expansion is associated with rising inequality, consistent with skill-biased technological change and platform concentration dynamics. The relationship differs with democratic accountability and political stability. Stronger Voice and Accountability is associated with a turning point at lower penetration levels, with conditional turning points ranging from approximately 7 subscriptions per 100 people at the 75th percentile of institutional quality to levels outside the observed range at the 25th percentile. The pattern persists under market income Gini, lagged broadband, a flexible spline, and two-way clustered inference, and is directionally consistent with, but not independently identified by, IV estimation. It does not survive region-by-year fixed effects or country-specific trends, and is best read as a within-country association. The results suggest that institutionally capable countries may reach the disequalizing phase sooner, so redistributive policy responses may need to be in place before, not after, broadband penetration approaches relatively low levels.
Escalating geopolitical tensions and sustainability-driven regulatory shifts have intensified fragmentation in global trade, raising concerns about the vulnerability of commodity-exporting countries. This study examines the impact of global geopolitical risk on the export competitiveness of Indonesia's crude palm oil (CPO) sector and investigates whether this relationship reflects a restructuring of global commodity trade. Monthly data from January 2006 to January 2024 are analyzed using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach, allowing the simultaneous estimation of short-run and long-run dynamics. The model incorporates export prices, exchange rates, inflation, sustainability certification, and global oil prices as control variables. The results reveal that geopolitical risk exerts a negative and statistically significant effect on CPO export competitiveness in the long-run, while its short-run effect operates through a lagged adjustment mechanism associated with supply chain disruptions and logistics uncertainty. Robustness checks confirm that the effect remains consistent after controlling for global oil prices. Sub-period analysis comparing the pre- and post-EU RED II periods indicates a change in the magnitude of the geopolitical risk effect, suggesting adaptive restructuring in Indonesia's CPO trade configuration. These findings imply that the competitiveness of Indonesian CPO is increasingly shaped by geopolitical uncertainty, regulatory fragmentation, and domestic market fundamentals. Strengthening market diversification, supply chain resilience, downstream upgrading, and sustainability compliance is therefore crucial for maintaining competitiveness in a fragmented global trade environment.
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine displaced roughly 130,000 people into Slovakia, a country that at the end of 2021 recorded sixty-one holders of tolerated residence and had no dedicated budget line for the integration of foreigners. The European Union's first activation of the Temporary Protection Directive gave those arriving a legal status within days and an almost immediate permit-free access to the labour market. This article asks why that formally liberal approach translated so unevenly into the services that make settlement possible – housing, school places, interpreting, social work – and why outcomes also diverge between two cities operating under identical national law (Bratislava and Nitra).We argue that the answer is fiscal before it is political, and we develop this as an extension of the restrictive-liberal and selective-universal (ReLiSU) framework. Governments do not move freely within the ReLiSU space: under a resource envelope planned for ordinary conditions, coverage and generosity are mechanically linked, so that a sudden influx narrows the set of feasible policies before any preference is expressed. In a unitary state that envelope is distributed unevenly across tiers. The national level controls taxation and faces the most electorally sensitive public; municipalities bear the physical incidence of arrivals but acquire no corresponding revenue claim, because Slovak shared-tax allocation counts only permanent residents – a category from which temporary protection beneficiaries are legally excluded. Supranational compensation through the CARE flexibilities and UN agency funding is real, but re-allocative, capped and time-limited.Drawing on legal and budgetary analysis, administrative statistics and stakeholder interviews conducted in Bratislava and Nitra within an EU Technical Support Instrument project, and comparing Slovakia with Poland, Germany, and Austria, we show that integration responsibility devolves to municipalities and NGOs not by delegation but by the absence of assignment. The paper is a conceptual contribution applied to one case rather than a fiscal accounting of it. Its claim is that Slovakia's configuration is not a weak imitation of Western European integration policy, but the predictable output of temporary protection administered without a dedicated intergovernmental financing instrument.
Objective This paper estimates the transmission of Bank Al-Maghrib's policy rate to seven bank rates over 2008–2024 and examines differences across credit products and policy directions. Methods Symmetric and nonlinear ARDL models use conditional small-sample inference and a complementary test on lagged regressor levels; a five-variable VAR with the official BIS nominal effective exchange rate is reported descriptively. Findings The symmetric mortgage coefficient is 1.126 and is consistent with unity, but its apparent cointegration under the original two-test procedure does not survive the three-test bootstrap when lags are reselected. In the full-sample NARDL, equipment and mortgage relationships satisfy the conditional three-test criterion and policy-rate cuts have larger coefficients than hikes. Equipment asymmetry ceases to be significant after a 2018 regime adjustment; mortgage asymmetry remains positive in point estimates but is sensitive to the break date and residual diagnostics. Consumer-credit evidence remains mixed and does not establish a long-run coefficient of 0.600. The VAR suggests limited and imprecise macroeconomic responses and is not treated as structural evidence. Implications Product-level heterogeneity merits attention in monetary transmission monitoring; the data do not identify the effects of fiscal or macroprudential interventions.
