Despite strong GDP growth and a favourable demographic profile, India faces an impending jobs crisis. A large share of the workforce remains employed in lowproductivity agriculture, while many new labour market entrants are absorbed into the persistently large informal sector. By contrast, China's rapid ascent was driven by manufacturing-led, export-oriented industrialisation, underpinned by large inflows of foreign direct investment and sustained technology transfer. India's manufacturing base remains modest in contrast. The bulk of well-paid, formal employment continues to be concentrated in the high-skill services sector. This paper contrasts the development trajectories of these two economies and identifies several underutilised jobs-growth levers in India: manufacturing, goods exports, manufacturing-oriented foreign direct investment and innovation. All of these remain underdeveloped, yet together they offer a pathway to more labour-absorbing, durable growth. Leveraging them effectively would be central to achieving India's 'Viksit Bharat 2047' ambition of attaining high-income status. The scale of India's challenge to employ eight to ten million labour-market entrants per year implies that job creation must become an explicit policy priority. This calls for greater trade openness, particularly with Asia and Europe, to integrate India into Asia-centric global supply chains as an alternative to China. Labour market reform is equally critical, making the effective implementation of the new labour codes essential. Strengthening innovation ecosystems and realigning education and skills policies to support industrialisation are also key. Without these structural shifts, India's current pattern of jobless growth risks transforming its demographic dividend into a long-term liability.

This article views the economic development history of New China as a history of openness and constant adjustment. We examine China’s economic development and early open policies from 1953 to 1978, analyze how the nation navigated between planned and open economic models during the formative period. Through a comprehensive review ofthe key Chinese and Western scholarship, investigates major initiatives including the Soviet-assisted 156 Projects, First Five-Year Plan, The policy of Eight Characters and the later “Four Three Plan” of the Western engagement. The study highlights both achievements and challenges, particularly in industrial growth and technology transfer, while assessing the impact of critical events like the Sino-Soviet split. Statistical analysis and quantitative models demonstrate how these early experiments with economic openness, despite ideological constraints and operational difficulties, established crucial institutional and technological foundations for China’s subsequent reform and modernization. The findings offer valuable insights into China’s unique development path and its implications for emerging economies.

The global financial system is currently navigating a profound transformation driven by digitalization and the rise of decentralized financial innovations. In response, central banks are increasingly exploring or implementing Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) as a sovereign digital evolution of fiat money. This study investigates the dual nature of CBDCs, evaluating whether they represent a strategic opportunity to modernize the economy or a systemic threat to existing financial stability. Employing a qualitative methodology, the research analyzes official policy frameworks from the IMF and BIS alongside diverse real-world case studies, including China’s e-CNY, the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar, Nigeria’s eNaira, and the European Central Bank’s Digital Euro. The findings suggest that while CBDCs offer significant benefits—such as enhanced payment efficiency, reduced transaction costs, and improved financial inclusion—they also introduce critical risks. These include the potential disintermediation of commercial banks, heightened cybersecurity vulnerabilities, and concerns regarding individual data privacy and government surveillance. The study concludes that the successful integration of CBDCs is not merely a technical challenge but a social and strategic one. Adoption is heavily dependent on infrastructure, digital literacy, and public trust. Ultimately, the research highlights that there is no "one-size-fits-all" model; the future of money will be shaped by how effectively individual nations balance technological innovation with the preservation of financial architecture.

A central premise of mandatory disclosure regulation is that greater transparency reduces information asymmetry and lowers borrowing costs. We challenge this premise by examining industry-level operational disclosure - a regulatory form that reveals horizontally comparable information across peer firms rather than refining individual firm fundamentals. Exploiting the staggered introduction of mandatory industry-specific disclosure guidelines by Chinese stock exchanges between 2013 and 2019, we find that enhanced industry disclosure significantly widens bond credit spreads by approximately 54 basis points - the opposite of what standard disclosure theory predicts. This counterintuitive effect is more pronounced in non-homogeneous industries, among smaller firms, and for bonds restricted to institutional investors. Mechanism tests confirm two opposing channels: disclosure reduces information asymmetry while simultaneously intensifying product market competition by exposing strategically sensitive operational metrics. Our evidence challenges the one-size-fits-all approach to disclosure regulation and highlights that the competitive implications of disclosed information - not merely its quantity - shape credit risk pricing.

Breaking away from being “large but not strong” and accelerating the internal “dual circulation” reform to integrate the manufacturing and service industries is a daunting challenge. This study examines how environmental regulations and financial instruments can simultaneously drive servitization evolution and green transformation. Utilizing the Green Credit Guidelines (GCG) policy rollout by China in 2012 as a quasi-natural experiment, we analyze 2007-2021 data from A-share listed manufacturing corporations through DID model to evaluate the policy ramifications and investigate servitization direction. The results show that: (1) While GCG generally promotes overall servitization, it biases firms toward traditional rather than modern servitization pathways. (2) Contrary to typical innovation compensation effects, GCG induces short-sight in managerial decisions, favoring quick wins over innovation-driven progress. These results highlight why firms have tended to advance traditional servitization while constraining modern servitization efforts. (3) Heterogeneity analysis shows stronger policy impacts in firms with domestically-oriented executives and domestic ownership, where both overall and traditional servitization are significantly enhanced.

This study challenges democratic citizenship theory by examining altruistic behaviour in authoritarian China. We find that financial resources influence prosocial engagement primarily through psychological mediators such as long-term planning and self-discovery, rather than directly providing material means for participation. Communist Party membership shapes specific domestic ideological orientations, but not attitudes toward market regulation or income equality, while cultural tradition emerges as a stronger predictor of certain political attitudes than party affiliation. Cluster analysis identifies three distinct citizen profiles: (1) future-oriented altruists; (2) status-driven contributors; and, (3) short-termpragmatists, revealing motivational heterogeneity within authoritarian publics. These findings suggest that authoritarian citizenship operates through psychological mediation and plural motivational pathways fundamentally different from democratic societies, with potential applicability to other single-party regimes where states actively structure prosocial behaviour. The study contributes to comparative authoritarianism literature by theorizing how regime type moderates the relationship between socio-economic resources, political identity, and civic engagement.

The COVID-19 pandemic has reshaped regional economic landscapes. However, academic research has not yet sufficiently addressed how external investment in regions has been transformed under the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and its influence on industrial evolution patterns. In this paper, we integrate insights from economic geography literature and develop a conceptual framework to further theorise the relationship between external shocks, changes in the industrial heterogeneity of investment from regional core cities, and local industrial dynamics. Using the COVID-19 pandemic and the Yangtze River Delta region as a case study, we employ an intensity-based Difference-in-Differences (DID) approach and draw on business registration and enterprise investment databases to estimate the impact of the pandemic shock on the evolution of local industrial dynamics between 2018 and 2024. Our findings indicate that after the core cities underwent the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic, the path dependence of industrial evolution in their surrounding areas significantly increased. The stronger the economic linkage with Shanghai, the more pronounced this effect. However, this impact also exhibits spatial heterogeneity across the Yangtze River Delta, associated with regional industrial division of labour and cooperation. This paper offers an innovative examination of how changes in the industrial heterogeneity of investment inflows from core cities—specifically, dimensions such as relatedness to local industries, industrial upgrading, and diversification—shape the mechanisms of local industrial evolution following the COVID-19 shock. Our findings offer important implications for regional development and adaptive responses in the post-pandemic era.

Despite strong GDP growth and a favourable demographic profile, India faces an impending jobs crisis. A large share of the workforce remains employed in low-productivity agriculture, while many new labour market entrants are absorbed into the persistently large informal sector. By contrast, China’s rapid ascent was driven by manufacturing-led, export-oriented industrialisation, underpinned by large inflows of foreign direct investment and sustained technology transfer. India’s manufacturing base remains modest in contrast. The bulk of well-paid, formal employment continues to be concentrated in the high-skill services sector. This paper contrasts the development trajectories of these two economies and identifies several underutilised jobs-growth levers in India: manufacturing, goods exports, manufacturing-oriented foreign direct investment and innovation. All of these remain underdeveloped, yet together they offer a pathway to more labour-absorbing, durable growth. Leveraging them effectively would be central to achieving India’s ‘Viksit Bharat 2047’ ambition of attaining high-income status. The scale of India’s challenge to employ eight to ten million labour-market entrants per year implies that job creation must become an explicit policy priority. This calls for greater trade openness, particularly with Asia and Europe, to integrate India into Asia-centric global supply chains as an alternative to China. Labour market reform is equally critical, making the effective implementation of the new labour codes essential. Strengthening innovation ecosystems and realigning education and skills policies to support industrialisation are also key. Without these structural shifts, India’s current pattern of jobless growth risks transforming its demographic dividend into a long-term liability.

Digitalization is widely promoted as a means to enhance faculty development, yet in resource-constrained regions like Northwest China, structural inequalities persist. This qualitative case study examines how national policy, institutional capacity, and faculty agency interact to shape digital support in higher education. Drawing on institutional records and interviews with faculty from two universities, the study reveals stark disparities in funding, infrastructure, and training strategies. Research-intensive institutions benefit from policy-backed resources and expert-led programs, while regional universities rely on low-cost lectures and collaborations. Faculty report limited autonomy, disciplinary biases, and insufficient support for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence. In this regional context, these findings challenge assumptions of resource neutrality and technological determinism in digital education policy. The study proposes a governance-oriented framework that emphasizes institutional responsibility, faculty empowerment, and context-sensitive digital strategies. It offers insights for policymakers and institutions seeking to advance equitable and sustainable faculty development in digitally transforming higher education systems.

Small scale mining has always been part of life in Ghana, but its illegal form known as galamsey has grown into one of the country’s biggest problems. Galamsey gives work to many people, yet still it destroys rivers, forests and farms, leaving communities struggling to survive. This paper looks at the laws that guide small scale mining in Ghana, from the days of traditional mining, through the colonial period, the Small Scale Gold Mining Law of 1989, and the Minerals and Mining Act, 2006 (Act 703) as amended by Act 995. It explains how weak enforcement, corruption, political interference and the role of foreigners, especially some Chinese nationals, have made the laws less effective. The paper also shows, through recent court cases such as Republic v Fynn and Republic v Domotey and Others, that Ghana’s courts are ready to punish offenders when cases are well presented. The courts have given long prison terms and heavy fines, showing that they are not the weak link in the fight. The real problem is poor enforcement and selective justice, since many foreigners are deported instead of being put on trial. The paper argues that solving the galamsey problem needs strong enforcement, freedom from political interference, the setting up of special environmental courts, and better job opportunities for rural communities. With these steps, Ghana can protect the environment while also supporting its people to make a living in lawful ways.