Bank interest rates and macroeconomic performance: The Nigerian banks’ perspective

Understanding the macroeconomic factors is essential for all firms operating in the economy. Investment decisions, financing decisions, and risk management of firms are influenced by the existing macroeconomic factors, thereby impacting their performance. This paper examines the effect of macroeconomic factors on the performance of Indian manufacturing firms. Two-step generalized method of moments model is applied in this investigation to analyze the effect of firm performance from the financial year 2004-05 to 2021-22. Firm performance is proxied by two accounting-based measures and a market-based measure, namely, return on assets, return on equity, and Tobin’s Q, respectively, while the macro-economic factor is proxied by annual gross domestic product growth rate. The empirical findings show that firm performance has a positive relationship with macroeconomic factors. In addition, the findings reveal that firm size, firm age, leverage, sales growth, and operating profit impact firm performance. The study further extends to examine the moderating effect of financing constraints (measured by firm size and age) on macroeconomic factors and firm performance. The results show that the effect is more pronounced on small and young firms as compared to large and mature firms. The study also evaluates the impact of macroeconomic factors on firm performance excluding the crisis periods (the financial crisis of 2008 and the COVID-19 pandemic) and finds the impact on the market performance to be insignificant during non-crisis periods. This study recommends that lenders, managers, and other stakeholders should take proactive policy measures for any anticipated adverse changes in macroeconomic factors on the performance of Indian firms.

Acknowledgments
The financial and infrastructural support provided by FORE School of Management, New Delhi, India in completing this paper is gratefully acknowledged.

The increasing role of digitalization in the banking sector necessitates an in-depth analysis of the impact of information technology (IT) investments on bank profitability. The paper analyzes the influence of IT investments on the profitability of Vietnamese commercial banks. The data were collected from 27 commercial banks in Vietnam between 2010 and 2022. The methodology used in this paper is the Feasible Generalised Least Squares (FGLS) regression. The key results indicate that investment in IT has improved the overall performance of banks, as evidenced by an average increase of 1.8% in Return on Assets (ROA) and 15.3% in Return on Equity (ROE). In addition, the Equity-to-Asset ratio exerts a favorable influence on bank performance, increasing ROA by 15.7% and ROE by 40.9%. Furthermore, bank size also demonstrates a positive correlation with both ROA and ROE, raising it by 0.3% and 2.3%, respectively. Based on these findings, more efficient investment in digital transformation, collaboration with Fintech firms, IT competence enhancement for staff, and communication promotion for Vietnamese commercial banks are recommended. Enabling environments for bank digital transformation should be provided by the Government in building a centralized database and electronic systems, introducing fintech regulations, establishing digital ecosystems, and implementing security solutions.

Acknowlegment
This paper is funded by the National Economics University, Hanoi, Vietnam.
The authors would like to express their gratitude to the comments from chairs, scholars, and audiences at the 19th International Conference on Humanities & Social Sciences 2024 – Applying Humanities & Social Sciences for a sustainable future, Khonkhaen University, Thailand (ICHUSO-011). This paper has been revised significantly after presenting at the IC-HUSO 2024 Conference.

The article analyzes the influence of inflation on economic growth and substantiates the main directions of increasing the effectiveness of the central bank's anti-inflation policy.
In order to determine the limit of inflation, the excess of which has a negative impact on the economic growth, the relationship is analyzed between the inflation rate and the real GDP growth rate on the basis of IMF statistics using the example of 158 countries. It was determined that in 2010–2017, in the global economy, the 6.0% inflation was the marginal value of the inflation rate, beyond which the economic growth rate declined or slowed down.
Given the inverse relationship between the inflation rate and the real GDP growth rates as well as empirical calculations for the period 1996–2017, the threshold for inflation rate for Ukraine at the level of 4.51% was determined based on empirical calculations for the 1996–2017 period. The results indicate that the National Bank of Ukraine set the inflation target above the level of the calculated threshold inflation.
It has also been established that the link between the rates of nominal GDP growth, as opposed to real GDP, and the inflation rate, is more direct and more tight. It is substantiated that to analyze such dependence it is better to use GDP deflator instead of CPI. The results indicate that deflation constrains economic growth much less than inflation.
In order to increase the effectiveness of the central bank’s pro-cyclical monetary policy aimed at supporting economic growth, the relationship between the rates of real GDP growth and the indicator characterizing the gap between the growth rates of M3 and inflation, which actually reflects the real money supply dynamics, is determined. The results obtained allowed to conclude that in 2009 and 2014-2017, the artificial “squeezing” of the money supply took place in Ukraine, resulting in a decrease in the level of the economy monetization by 22.0% in 2017 compared to 2013.
It has been proved that in order to minimize the negative impact of inflationary processes on economic growth, the policy of the National Bank of Ukraine should be aimed at eliminating the artificial squeezing of the money supply through a reasonable increase in the economy monetization and the implementation of an effective monetary policy.