This study examines the macroeconomic and institutional determinants of financial development in Indonesia by employing the Fourier Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach. The methodology is chosen to account for mixed integration orders and smooth structural shifts that characterize emerging economies. In the long run, government effectiveness and interest rates are significant positive drivers of financial development, while economic development, inflation, foreign direct investment, and political stability are not statistically significant. The insignificance of economic development, reflecting Indonesia’s persistent informality and crisis-induced disruptions, instead supports institutional theory, which highlights governance quality as a central determinant of financial deepening. In the short run, inflation, foreign direct investment, interest rate, and government effectiveness exert significant influences, while the Fourier sine and cosine terms confirm the importance of nonlinear dynamics, capturing both immediate shocks and gradual reforms. Meanwhile, the error correction term indicates rapid convergence to the long-run equilibrium. Overall, the findings demonstrate that financial development in Indonesia is shaped less by economic expansion than by institutional strength, macroeconomic management, and structural adjustments. The study concludes that enhancing governance effectiveness, maintaining monetary and price stability, and integrating foreign capital more effectively into domestic markets are critical for sustaining resilient and inclusive financial development.

Growing evidence highlights the gender-transformative potential of water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH) interventions, which can shape gender equality and social inclusion alongside and through improvements in WASH practices, service delivery, and governance. This paper presents results from a quasi-experimental evaluation of the gender-transformative impacts of WASH interventions in the districts of Dailekh and Sarlahi in Nepal between 2020 and 2022. This timeframe also overlapped with the COVID-19 pandemic. The evaluation utilized propensity-score-matching and difference-in-difference techniques with the 16-theme water, sanitation, and hygiene – gender equality measure (WASH-GEM) to differentiate results between women and men of varying levels of program involvement. Average scores increased in 10 of the 16 themes for men, while decreasing in 10 themes for women; suggesting that men experienced greater improvements in gendered outcomes. Nonetheless, active participation in the program led to higher benefits or mitigated negative impacts in 15 themes, and women had better outcomes than men in 13 of these. These results suggest that active participation in the program had a positive net benefit for women participants, mitigating the negative gender impacts of the pandemic. This study illustrates the value of gender-transformative WASH programming as a pathway not only to improved WASH but also advancing equality.

ABSTRACT As Gulf countries—particularly Qatar—transition from state-led economies to diversified and market-driven systems, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has emerged as a key mechanism for sustainable development. This study draws on 36 semi-structured interviews in Qatar and secondary analysis of Singapore’s CSR frameworks to compare two contrasting governance models. Qatar’s state-led approach ensures policy alignment with General Secretariat for Development Planning 2030 but limits private-sector innovation, whereas Singapore’s market-oriented model fosters flexibility and entrepreneurship but risks uneven social outcomes. Integrating Institutional, Stakeholder, and Resource-Dependence theories with the Shared Value approach, the paper proposes a hybrid CSR governance model suited to post-rentier contexts. This model balances state coordination and corporate autonomy through accreditation systems, digital transparency, independent audits, and incentive-based accountability. Theoretically, it advances CSR governance scholarship by showing how legitimacy and innovation can co-evolve. Practically, it offers a roadmap for Gulf states to transform CSR from a compliance obligation into a strategic catalyst for inclusive and sustainable development.

ABSTRACT This study analyzes threshold effects in the relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and international trade in 50 emerging markets from 2010 to 2023 using Panel Threshold Vector Error Correction Models. It identifies an institutional quality threshold at 0.647, above which FDI and trade show stronger long-term relationships and faster adjustment speeds. Countries with higher institutional quality converge to equilibrium 2.3 times faster and have less regime persistence. These findings suggest that improvements in institutional quality above this threshold significantly enhance FDI-trade integration, offering clear targets for policy interventions in emerging markets.

ABSTRACT This longitudinal study tracked 200 households across Colombia–Venezuela border cities (2023-2025) to examine how informal dollarization reshapes food consumption patterns. Using difference-in-differences, propensity score matching, and hierarchical modeling, results showed dollar-exposed households increased processed food consumption (+1.86 servings/week, p = 0.004) and imported foods (+2.14 servings/week, p = 0.003) while reducing traditional regional foods (−0.75 servings/week, p = 0.048). Dollar access improved food security but decreased dietary diversity and increased environmental footprint through higher carbon emissions and packaging waste. Findings reveal how currency composition creates new pathways of nutrition transition, weakening local food systems while improving hunger prevention in economically volatile border regions.

ABSTRACT This study examines the experiences of local government councilors between 2013–2020 in four provinces of Pakistan. The study addresses three key questions: Firstly, it investigates the differences and commonalities in the local government structures across provinces and explores the potential for synchronization to enhance the implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) at the local level. Secondly, it examines the main challenges local councilors face in effectively delivering basic services, including water, sanitation, health, education, waste management, and transport, within both rural and urban contexts. Lastly, the study analyses the necessary changes or reforms at the provincial level within the existing local government system in rural and urban areas to ensure the delivery of basic services in alignment with SDGs. The findings reveal that a powerful bureaucracy and political influence at the intermediate to upper levels of the government hierarchy exert significant control over administrative, fiscal, and political.

ABSTRACT In the recent years, there has been a global decline in the number of farmers contributing to the agrarian transition. Therefore, this study delves into the case study of Thailand's ‘Young Smart Farmer (YSF)’ program, designed to counteract the declining farmer population. The study seeks to elucidate the motivations behind individuals opting to become new farmers and the challenges they face. It revealed five primary motivations to embrace farming: profitability, well-being, traditional and cultural values, taking over the family business, and social influences. This study also identifies the current challenges encountered by Thai farmers, including issues related to agricultural production, marketing, assets, seasonality and unexpected shocks, and criticism. To improve the program’s effectiveness, this study recommends four key strategies: establishing knowledge certification linkages, refinement of workshops and training content, expanding farmer networks, and implementing policies aimed at nurturing new farming talent.

ABSTRACT In this study, we examine the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between tourism and carbon emissions in 29 sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries using data from 1995 to 2019. Departing from the previous studies, we have also grouped SSA countries into low- and middleincome countries, thereby estimating three panels. We have used a wide range of panel estimation techniques to examine this linkage, including the dynamic common-correlated effects (DCCE), the Driscoll-Kraay estimators, and the fully-modified OLS (FMOLS). Our results show that the relationship between tourism and carbon emissions depends largely on the estimation technique used and the level of income of the individual countries. Overall, we can conclude that there is primafacie evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between tourism and carbon emissions in middle-income countries and all SSA countries combined, but not in low-income countries. This means that the perceived adverse effects of tourism expansion on environmental pollution may only be experienced in the early stages of tourism development and that as the tourism sector develops, tourism is likely to promote energy conservation through sustainable tourism or green tourism, thereby leading to a reduction in carbon emissions. Policy implications are discussed.

ABSTRACT International policymakers prioritize financial stability and inclusion, but often view them as separate goals, overlooking potential overlap and trade-offs. If synergies and trade-offs between the two concepts are not recognized and understood, policy design may yield less-than-ideal results. This paper provides a systematic review of the theoretical literature on financial inclusion and financial stability as well as empirical research initiatives examining the relationship between the two concepts. We found that current studies do not always present a unified theoretical approach or conceptual framework to explain the channels of the relationship between financial inclusion and stability. Empirical studies to date offer divergent views on the financial inclusion and stability nexus. While some studies are inconclusive, some also suggest that financial inclusion has a positive and significant impact on financial stability, as explained by the institutional theory. While other studies, supported by the aggressive credit expansion theory, reveal that financial inclusion can have a negative influence on financial stability. Through this comprehensive review, we intend to improve awareness and cohesion among scholars and policy makers of financial inclusion and financial stability while also facilitating the development of solid foundations to address future research and policy making challenges.

ABSTRACT The successful economic performance of Pacific Asia is often held as a source of inspiration for aspiring catching-up countries. Notwithstanding, recent literature suggests that a key to the understanding of successful long-term economic performance lies not only in the ability to generate economic growth, but in limiting incidences of economic shrinking. Such analyses to explain the Asian economic miracle are however in short supply. This study highlights the significance of economic shrinking in Asia in a comparative perspective to demonstrate how and why resilience to economic shrinking was a significant aspect of the successful development of the region. To approach the question of why some countries became more resilient than others we propose a social capability framework and apply it to a sample of 26 developing countries between 1964 and 2018. We construct a social capability index on which we develop a set of simple OLS regressions to estimate the impact of social capabilities on shrinking patterns. We demonstrate that poorly endowed countries do not lack the ability to generate growth, but their limited resilience prevents them from catching up.