The Nexus Between Subjective Well-Being and Labour Productivity:Evidence from Selected Asia- Pacific Economies

The current study investigates the nexus between subjective well-being and labour productivity growth in the context of select Asia-Pacific economies, viz., Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, South Korea and Japan over the period 2011-2023. Considering Cantril Ladder Score and negative affect score published by the World Happiness Report 2024 as a measure of subjective well-being and using panel fixed effects and random effects techniques, the study finds statistically significant evidence of a positive impact of subjective well-being on labour productivity growth. The results are further reiterated when the Panel Ganger non-causality tests by Juodis et al. (2021) are used. The results are stronger for emerging and developing economies than for the developed ones. The study also shows statistically significant evidence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between subjective well-being and productivity growth
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Spillovers of the U.S. Monetary Policy Uncertainty to India’s Real Economy:A Channel-Specific ARDL Analysis

The Study empirically examines how uncertainty in the United States (U.S.) monetary policy affects India’s industrial output through the interest rate channel. The analysis uses monthly data from 1997 to 2020 and applies the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds-testing approach to examine both short-run and long-run effects. The Toda–Yamamoto method is also used to confirm the direction of causality. Monetary policy uncertainty is measured through the index developed by Husted, Rogers and Sun (2017), while the Leo Krippner Shadow Short Rate (LKSSR) is used as a measure of the actual U.S. policy stance. The model also accounts for major crisis periods such as the Asian financial crisis, the dot-com collapse, the global financial crisis and the European debt shock. The results show that higher uncertainty in the U.S. policy reduces India’s industrial production in both the short and long term. Nearly half of the adjustment towards equilibrium takes place within a month. Crisis periods make the impact stronger, which suggests that uncertainty shocks are more damaging when global conditions are weak. The impulse response patterns show that the decline in industrial output is sharpest about six to eight months after the shock and then settles by the second year. The dynamic multipliers confirm that the adjustment is gradual and persistent. The main contribution of the study is the joint use of a forward-looking uncertainty index and the shadow rate within a single, channel-specific framework. India’s one-year treasury yield, which is highly correlated with India’s policy rate, viz, repo rate, is used to represent domestic financial conditions, as it remains consistent across changing policy regimes.
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Impact of India’s Trade Agreement with Japan on its FDI Inflows:A Brief Analysis

The economic reforms of 1991 transformed India’s economy from a relatively closed to an open, liberal and market-oriented system. These reforms not only led to reduced trade barriers but also helped in augmenting foreign investments (notably, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI)) in the country. There are several benefits of FDI in terms of augmenting a nation’s production capacities, technology transfers and improvements in human and physical capital. Keeping these in view, the country has sought to boost its FDI inflows through trade agreements such as India-Japan Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA). Hence, this study aims at furnishing strong empirical evidence to understand whether India- Japan CEPA has facilitated greater FDI inflows to India. The same is studied with the help of VECM model for the time period 2000-23. The study contends that this trade agreement has had a beneficial and substantial impact on India’s FDI influx. In the future, India should ensure that upcoming CEPA type agreements are supplemented by supporting policies designed to foster sectoral competitiveness, regulatory efficiency and investment sustainability.
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Does ESG Affect Firms’ Borrowing Cost? Evidence from an Emerging Market

This study investigates the relationship between Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) disclosure scores and the Cost of Debt (CoD) of Indian companies. By investigating whether companies with better ESG disclosure ratings have lower borrowing costs, this study seeks to add to the expanding body of information. Drawing on a comprehensive dataset covering nine years (2014-2022) and the Nifty 500 index as the specified study domain, the findings reveal a negative and statistically significant relationship between ESG scores and the CoD, suggesting that firms with robust ESG practices tend to access cheaper debt financing. The study also highlights the significant mediating impact of firm size and the presence of women on boards on the relationship between ESG and the debt financing cost of Indian companies.
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