Journal of Global Economics

The European legislator has introduced a mandatory audit firm rotation principally after ten years and with regard to a cooling off period of four years to increase auditor independence. This kind of external rotation complements the existing internal mandatory rotation (auditor rotation). This paper implies a critical review of the economics need of rotation rules. In contrast to the perception of the European standard setter, mandatory external rotation will not automatically lead to an increased financial accounting and audit quality.

The aim of this article is to examine the implications of demographic change in Egypt. This paper provides new grounds for research and applications in designing, developing, implementing and institutionalizing decision support and their use in socio-economic development. This work goes beyond both a theoretical expectation and empirical evidence that rapid population growth is one of the crucial problems that have hindered development efforts in the region; it carries serious implications for employment, access to services and the cost of subsidies. These could spell serious political consequences in what is already a politically unstable state. Population data for Egypt are extremely sensitive and need to be treated cautiously. Nonetheless, it is clear that Egypt since the 1970s has experienced a dramatic rise in population compared to other parts of the developing world. Despite the progress of economic reforms and structural adjustments program applied during the past years, Egypt is still suffering in the beginning of the twenty first century- from a slowdown in the economic activity, a shortage in foreign exchange earnings, structural imbalances in the labor market, a high rate of unemployment, and a growing government deficit. Rapid population growth in a country known for its scarcity of inhabitable land and fresh water could put an extraordinary strain on the environment and could turn it to an untenable population density.

Stock price fluctuation asymmetry, the asymmetry between stock price rise and fall speed, is a general feature of stock indices. Based on inverse statistics, a new measurement, named as asymmetry index, is proposed to evaluate this asymmetry. We calculate and compare asymmetry indices of historical prices from ten stock markets. It is found that in most stock markets, price fall is faster than price rise; while in China and India, price rise is generally faster than price fall.

The causation relationship between economic growth and military spending in developing countries was subject to intense debate in recent years. This study examines the causal relationship between aggregate government spending and economic growth in Algeria for the period 1980-2010. We also break down the aggregate government spending into military and civilian spending and assess their impact on economic growth. Both bivariate and multivariate co-integration is utilized to determine the type and direction of causality. Using Johansen’s co-integration procedure and VECM, the study showed the existence of uni-directional causality between economic growth and military spending. This study also uses the variance decomposition analysis to assess the dynamic effect of one variable on the other two variables in the model beyond the sample period.

This paper employs the panel unit root tests and dynamic OLS (DOLS) estimator based on 29 provinces of China between 1996 and 2013 to estimate the relationship between government spending and private consumption with/without disposable income. It is shown that i) an increase in the aggregate level of government spending has a positive effect on private consumption; ii) a rise in the spending on economic construction and administrative management has a negative impact on private consumption while the spending on culture and education crowds in private consumption.