Business and Economics Journal

This paper undertakes a review of the measures by which we assess the capital account convertibility of nations. These measures, which are central to understanding the rationales that lead policymakers to recalibrate capital controls and thereby change the convertibility of the capital account, have themselves evolved over time. The paper first provides a brief timeline and the shifting views of capital controls in the modern era, beginning at the start of the 20th century, through the interwar period and emerging market crises of the late 1990s, and then documents in detail how the measures used to assess changes to capital controls and convertibility have changed along with them.

Dollar Cost Averaging (DCA) is a popular investment approach, where one invests funds in increments, at periodic intervals, rather than allocate funds all at once, in a lump sum. The idea behind averaging into the market is that it not only lowers average price of an asset, but also lessens volatility of that assets’ performance. Despite theoretical criticisms, it is a widely prevalent investment technique. Kapalczynski and Lien (2021) augmented the traditional DCA approach by using conditional information to adjust aggressiveness of DCA. The Augmented Dollar Cost Averaging (ADCA) calls for allocating larger portion of funds into the market over shorter period of time, when economy is expanding, and allocating smaller amounts into the marker, when economy is receding. To determine expansions or recessions, Kapalczynski and Lien (2021) used changes in market volatility, unemployment and capacity utilization. Using Sharpe ratio and stochastic dominance criteria they showed statistically significant risk-reduction benefits of ADCA in the U.S. stock market between 1967 and 2018.

In this paper, we have reviewed the COVID induced shock to the debt and deficit profiles of 10 of the largest economies by size of GDP in 2019 referred to in this paper as the Big-10 economies. There is a sharp upsurge in their government debt-GDP ratios because their policy responses to the COVID induced recession have been large fiscal stimuli based on borrowing. With low and often negative growth rates and high fiscal deficit, the debt-GDP ratios are projected to rise sharply in these economies. As normalcy is restored, these countries may attempt to sharply reduce their borrowing levels relative to GDP. However, we argue that before this is done, individual countries may do well to reassess their sustainability norms whether cast in terms of agreements such as the Maastricht Treaty or country level Fiscal Responsibility Legislations (FRLs) or other similar norms. This revision is called for because of the longer-term trends in these economies of rising money supply, falling nominal interest rates and nominal growth rate. The contribution of this article lies in highlighting that the existing FRL norms have become dated in the European and other similar economies because of significant changes in macro parameters such as the interest rate, the long-term growth rate and the government debt-GDP profiles of these countries as compared to the time when these norms were originally determined. There is thus a need now to redetermine these norms which may be higher than their current levels. Even though, some recent literature suggests that the sustainability benchmarks may have shifted upwards, we argue that the post COVID debt-GDP ratios have exceeded these revised benchmarks by significant margins in the case of a number of the Big-10 economies.

Today, the online entertainment service industry has provided a huge business opportunity for people around the world, especially attracting many young people who have little capital but wish to start their first business online. In this research study, the author utilized her own online business experience to explore how a business operates on an entertainment service platform. McCarthy’s 4P marketing mix is applied in this paper to contribute to a better understanding of product, price, place, and promotion in an audio livestream business. An online live concert hall operated by the researcher is the analysis subject in this study. Based on the 4P marketing mix analysis on this subject, the study outcome with some practical marketing strategies might be beneficial to entrepreneurs seeking to develop a successful online business.