Issue #2 (Volume 7 2018)

Informal Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) play a key role in their respective economies over the world particularly in the African continent. This paper reviews various theories on SMEs towards understanding the potential of the informal sector in the context of African countries. The paper uses a theoretical approach for the purpose of assessing the challenges that have affected the development of the informal SMEs sector over the years in both the developing and developed world. Economically developing countries in Africa pose unique challenges to informal SMEs development compared to the developed countries. The paper reviews the theories that define the rise to informality in Africa by identifying the key determinants for the emergence of informal SMEs. A conceptual framework for assessing informal SME’s potential for Africa is developed. The conceptual framework is based on the Fishbone diagram developed by Kaoru Ishikawa (1986). This paper discusses the intricacies of the applicability of the proposed conceptual framework to assess the potential of the informal SMEs in Africa and the way forward for the formalization debate.

This paper examines the fintech concept and fintech market structure. The theoretical and methodological approaches to the adaptation of the Ukrainian banking market to fintech in terms of globalization are investigated. The problems of Ukrainian banking system reforming after the national economy long-term recession are determined. Phases of technology development in the Ukrainian banking system are considered and fintech innovations in Ukraine are discovered.

The experience of states with limited democracy shows that populist manipulations often result in a collapse of the pension insurance system, and then – in an escalation of economic, political and social instability. Accordingly, the development of tools for identifying and preventing economic populism manifestations does not become irrelevant.
Through analyzing the changes in pension legislation, as well as studying economic indicators’ dynamics, the article shows that pension insurance issues are widely used as tools for populist policy in Ukraine. This ultimately results in the formation of an abnormally low financial stability of the pension system. In particular, during the 2004 presidential election campaign and parliamentary election in 2007, there was a sharp short-term increase in the gap between growth rates of average pension and nominal GDP; significant deviation of replacement rate from its long-term average trajectory; and with some temporary lag, there emerged a substantial increase in transfers from the state budget.
It is noted that the main tools for economic populism in Ukraine are: (1) permanent procrastination of retirement age raising; (2) “manual” pensions indexation; (3) the existence of a VIP pensions and early retirement system for certain population categories; (4) transfer of burden to lower-income social contribution payers as a result of limiting the maximum value of unified social tax base.
The paper suggests a number of measures, the implementation of which could reduce the negative impact of populist decisions on budget balance of the Pension Fund of Ukraine

The aim of this article is to seek especially the impact of corruption on the bond and stock market development. For the methodology/approach, the authors analyze a sample of 20 listed Tunisian firms from the Stock Exchange and Financial market, covering the period from 2006 to 2016 by using pooling cross section techniques. The results find a significant positive effect of the level of corruption on the stock market index and the logarithm of capitalization. This is consistent with the view that corruption accelerates the economic growth by speeding up transactions and allowing private companies to overcome the inefficiencies imposed by the government. Furthermore, the results find a negative association is not significant with the dependent variable of traded value as a percentage of the number of listed companies.

Maharashtra is highly urbanized and economically developed state in India. But now the growth rate is declining, and debt burden has increased in the state. CAGR has been used to examine the impact of FRBM act on fiscal deficit in the state. The RBI data from 1991 to 2016 show that the primary and fiscal deficit is increasing fast. The revenue and capital expenditure are increasing after 2003 FRBM act. The debt burden has increased in the state due to interest payment, pension liabilities, seventh pay commission to state employees, farm loan waiver scheme and infrastructure projects. State government took loans from different sources to finance its capital expenditure. The least square regression result shows that development expenditure in the state has declined very fast. The expenditure on health, education and social welfare of scheduled caste and tribe has declined in the state over the period of time. Government must improve revenue and capital receipts within the short period. Efforts must be made to reduce the debt burden on the state. Therefore, a number of alternative policies are required to improve revenue and capital receipts. State government must increase taxes on electronic and tobacco-related products. Taxes must be increased on commercial vehicles, luxury hotels, entry tax at hill stations, malls and purchase of diamonds and gold, petrol and diesel. Such sources will increase tax revenue to state government and fiscal deficit can be reduced to some extent.