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on Confederation of Independent States |
| By: | Daniel Tuki; |
| Abstract: | Although considerable attention has been given to the growing realignment of many West African countries away from their former colonial ruler, France, and toward Russia—particularly in the realm of security cooperation—there remains a notable lack of large-N empirical research investigating how ordinary citizens perceive the effectiveness of foreign military forces from these countries. This study addresses that gap by focusing on Burkina Faso, a country that recently expelled French troops and welcomed Russian forces into its security landscape. Using nationally representative data from Afrobarometer, I examine how exposure to violence—both in the form of personal victimization and proximity to conflict—shapes public assessments of the contributions of French and Russian troops to national stability. Descriptive results indicate that citizens rate Russian forces significantly more favorably than their French counterparts. Regression analyses reveal that both victimization and conflict exposure are associated with more negative evaluations of French troops, although the relationship is relatively weak in the case of conflict exposure. In contrast, victimization is not correlated with perceptions of Russian troops, and while conflict exposure is positively associated with more favorable views of Russian forces, this finding is not robust when alternative measures of conflict exposure are used. Taken together, these results suggest that public attitudes toward foreign military actors may be shaped not only by security conditions on the ground but also by broader historical and geopolitical narratives. |
| Keywords: | burkina faso, france, military intervention, russia, security cooperation, terrorism, victimization, violent conflict |
| JEL: | D74 F51 F52 H56 O55 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hic:wpaper:438 |
| By: | Patrick A. Imam; Mr. Tigran Poghosyan |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the effectiveness of inflation targeting (IT) frameworks during the global inflation surge of 2022, a shock primarily driven by large adverse supply side disruptions following the onset of the War in Ukraine. The empirical findings suggest that (de jure) IT frameworks did not systematically deliver better inflation outcomes during this episode. The decline in inflation back towards historical norms was broadly comparable across (de jure) IT and non-IT country groups. While (de jure) IT central banks hiked their policy rates by more than non-IT central banks on average, this did not help with achieving better inflation outcomes. Also, we find no evidence of a more flexible exchange rate after the shock in (de jure) IT central banks. These findings suggest that (de jure) IT does not necessarily imply an advantage for monetary policy, particularly in the face of large, global supply shocks. Further analysis is warranted on how monetary policy frameworks can adapt to an environment characterized by more frequent and persistent supply-side disruptions. While using a de facto classification of IT regimes would be preferable, the absence of a comprehensive database makes this infeasible. |
| Keywords: | Inflation Targeting; Central Bank Credibility; Supply Shocks |
| Date: | 2025–10–24 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2025/212 |
| By: | Manners, Rhys; Warner, James; Schneider, Kate; Matsiko, Eric; Vasanthakaalam, Hilda; Benimana, Gilberthe; Spielman, David J. |
| Abstract: | This study estimates the cost and affordability of recommended diets in Rwanda from April 2019 to December 2024 using high-frequency market price data. By deploying standardised methods for healthy diet costs to eSoko data (www.esoko.gov.rw), and local food based dietary guidelines, we calculate the monthly cost of recommended diets at the district level. Key findings reveal significant dietary cost fluctuations, with nominal costs increasing 67% between June 2022 and October 2023, coinciding directly with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The research also identifies affordability challenges; by mid-2023, and again in late 2024, where up to 70% of wage earners could not afford a recommended diet. Spatial variations were also evident, with diet costs differing between rural and urban areas, and across districts bordering different countries, with the highest dietary costs observed along the Democratic Republic of Congo border and the least expensive along the border of Tanzania. Utilizing Rwanda's eSoko data platform, the study demonstrates the value of high-frequency, spatially explicit data for understanding food system dynamics. The findings call for policy actions to consider dietary affordability, particularly for low-income groups, and suggest that Rwanda's data collection approach could serve as a benchmark for other countries. |
| Keywords: | data; dietary guidelines; markets; trends; Rwanda; Africa; Eastern Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa |
| Date: | 2025–09–18 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fpr:rssppn:176590 |
| By: | Elvis K. Ofori (Taiyuan, China); Festus V. Bekun (Istanbul, Turkey); Bright A. Gyamfi (Istanbul, Turkey); Ali E. Baba (Yekaterinburg, Russia); Stephen T. Onifade (Konya, Turkey); Simplice A. Asongu (Johannesburg, South Africa) |
| Abstract: | The current study thus explored the impact of technological innovation and trade openness on clean energy while accounting for economic growth, access to electricity, pollution, industrial restructuring, and urbanization using data from 1990 to 2020 for both the MINT and BRICS economies. A series of test were performed for a robust analysis using second generation econometrics approaches before proceeding to investigate the long-run linkages between renewable energy and the duo of innovation and trade using the Prais-Winsten regression model with panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) while the Driscoll-Kraay standard errors test was applied for robustness checks. The results, firstly confirm the presence of heterogeneity, cross-sectional dependence, and cointegration among the selected variables. Secondly, technological innovation as a renewable energy determinant demonstrated negative elasticities in both BRICS countries and the full sample, but a positive elasticity in the MINT countries. Thirdly, concerning trade liberalisation, negative elasticities were obtained for the full sample and MINT countries, while the elasticities were positive for the BRICS bloc. Fourthly, the roles of economic growth and environmental pollution reveal a negative impact on renewable energy consumption for all samples while urbanisation and industrial restructuring promote renewable energy developments only in the BRICS bloc. Policy implications are discussed. |
| Keywords: | Renewable energy, trade liberalization, technological innovation, Prais-Winsten regression |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dbm:wpaper:24/007 |
| By: | Gert Peersman; (-) |
| Abstract: | This paper employs a joint SVAR-IV model for the United States and the euro area to estimate the pass-through of energy and food commodity cost shocks to inflation. Exogenous commodity cost shocks—such as those triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine—had only a modest impact on inflation during the post-pandemic period. However, counterfactual analyses based on the pass-through estimates indicate that overall commodity cost fluctuations—including their endogenous responses to macroeconomic conditions—can almost fully account for the rise and subsequent decline of energy, food, and core CPI inflation over this period. These findings highlight that commodity costs constitute a key transmission channel through which macroeconomic developments affect inflation. Estimates of a standard Phillips Curve specification, including its slope, are shown to be severely biased when this channel is ignored. |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:rug:rugwps:25/1123 |
| By: | Domenica Mino; Cillian Williamson |
| Abstract: | Artificial intelligence techniques have increasingly been applied to understand the complex relationship between public sentiment and financial market behaviour. This study explores the relationship between the sentiment of news related to the Russia-Ukraine war and the volatility of the stock market. A comprehensive dataset of news articles from major US platforms, published between January 1 and July 17, 2024, was analysed using a fine-tuned Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model adapted for financial language. We extracted sentiment scores and applied a Generalised Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) model, enhanced with a Student-t distribution to capture the heavy-tailed nature of financial returns data. The results reveal a statistically significant negative relationship between negative news sentiment and market stability, suggesting that pessimistic war coverage is associated with increased volatility in the S&P 500 index. This research demonstrates how artificial intelligence and natural language processing can be integrated with econometric modelling to assess real-time market dynamics, offering valuable tools for financial risk analysis during geopolitical crises. |
| Date: | 2025–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2510.16503 |
| By: | Gregorio Impavido |
| Abstract: | This paper assesses the relative contribution of domestic and external factors to headline inflation in Kazakhstan. We confirm earlier results that inflation is primarily imported, and we provide novel details on the sources of imported inflation and its transmission channels. We find that domestic factors like fiscal policy and more recently utility tariff increases are the key determinants of domestic inflationary pressures. We provide new information on the likely determinants of inflation expectations through which domestic and external factors affect inflation. We find that monetary policy has only been partially successful at containing domestic and external pressures with insufficient liquidity sterilization, likely contributing to weakening of the interest rate transmission channel. Finally, we find that shocks are highly persistent and bringing back inflation to its target is likely to be a difficult and long process for the Central Bank. |
| Keywords: | Inflation determinants; domestic factors; external factors; monetary policy; fiscal policy; inflation expectationsl SUR |
| Date: | 2025–10–10 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2025/210 |