Mark Gerald Ruiz, Ramona Maria Miral, John Paolo Rivera
This paper examines the fiscal impacts of climate-related events in the Philippines and proposes policy measures to build a climate-resilient economy. Through cross-sectional analysis, it finds that the fiscal resilience of local government units (LGUs) is influenced by their dependence on external revenues, the availability of preallocated funds, and the severity of disasters. The results underscore the need for region-specific fiscal strategies that diverge from conventional frameworks, given the country’s decentralized disaster management system and the pivotal role of local institutions. The study recommends establishing a dedicated climate resilience fund, adopting climate-responsive budgeting, strengthening risk transfer mechanisms, incentivizing green investments, and enhancing LGU capacity to manage adaptation financing. Additionally, investments in climate research, data-driven governance, and public awareness are essential. Aligning climate finance with long-term development goals and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development would integrate resilience into national planning, enabling the Philippines to better withstand climate risk while promoting sustainable growth and fiscal stability.
Amid intensifying climate change and rapid urbanization, urban ecosystems face unprecedented disturbances. Enhancing urban ecological resilience (UER) is thus a key governance issue. The explosive growth of digital finance (DF) has reshaped capital flows, but its ecological effects are dynamic and stage-specific. This study uses a dynamic nonlinear model to systematically explore the DF-UER relationship. The results reveal that: (1) There exists a U-shaped relationship between DF and UER. In the early stage, DF may negatively impact UER; however, Whereas as DF matures, it positively influences UER, with robust results from various tests. (2) Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the U-shaped relationship between DF and UER is more pronounced in smart city pilot cities, high government ecological attention cities, and cities with a high degree of market integration. (3) Mechanism tests reveal that DF has a U-shaped impact on green capital allocation, renewable energy technology innovation, and industrial structure optimization, consequently leading to a U-shaped effect on UER. (4) Fiscal decentralization and financial regulation strengthen the U-shaped relationship, whereas artificial intelligence tends to weaken it and may even reverse this trend. These findings point out the possible structural friction of DF, and provide valuable insights for supporting China and other economies to balance financial expansion and ecological security.
The European Union faces a structural confidence crisis in 2026, characterised by stagnating Eurozone growth (below 1.2%), deepening North–South fiscal tensions, East–West security divisions, and a fundamental redefinition of the transatlantic security relationship. Existing centralised coordination mechanisms have proven too slow and insufficiently adaptive to manage these simultaneous pressures. This paper introduces the European Octopus Model — a strategic geopolitical framework that reconceives EU governance through four geographically specialised "legs" (South, East, North, West), each leveraging its proximate regional environment, coordinated by a single AI-powered digital governance platform: the European Octopus Coordination Council (EOCC). The model adopts a Direct Benefit First principle (70% of project returns to the executing state; 30% to a collective fund), supported by a self-financing Hybrid Crisis Reserve Fund and a network of four Strategic Industrial Cities operating as Special Economic Zones. The framework is grounded in the Global Reflection Economic Theory (GRE), which treats institutional trust as a measurable economic asset and positions citizen co-production — rather than top-down institutional imposition — as the primary driver of sustainable productivity. Quantitative projections, drawing on IMF, IEA, ECB, and Eurostat baselines, suggest that full model implementation could raise Eurozone GDP growth to 1.7–1.9% by 2027 and 2.0–2.3% by 2028, against a baseline of 1.0–1.2%. The paper further provides a three-scenario comparative analysis, a 2026–2028 implementation roadmap, and an honest assessment of governance transition risks. "This framework builds upon and complements my previous geopolitical analysis developed in 'Europe in the Dark Decade' (Sara B., 2025)"
The persistence of global financial instability, sovereign debt fragility, inflationary volatility, and asymmetric currency dependence has intensified scholarly debate regarding the structural limitations of centralized fiat-monetary regimes. This study advances a theoretically grounded and institutionally operational Monetary Plurality Framework designed to enhance systemic resilience through diversified currency architecture, asset-anchored valuation, and hybrid governance integration. Drawing upon interdisciplinary monetary theory, comparative institutional analysis, and resilience economics, the research develops a multi-tier monetary ecosystem combining centralized macro-stability with decentralized micro-adaptability enabled by distributed ledger technologies. The findings suggest that monetary diversification reduces crisis transmission, strengthens domestic productive linkage, and improves long-term financial sovereignty. The study contributes to the literature by synthesizing complementary currency theory, asset-backed monetary design, and digital governance economics into a unified resilience-oriented model suitable for volatile global conditions.
Dobrotă Gabriela, DAN NICOLETA, BUTĂNESCU-VOLANIN REMUS-CONSTANTIN
Public finance sustainability represents a fundamental pillar of macroeconomic stability and a key determinant of the ability of states and local communities to cope with major economic shocks. Against the backdrop of successive crises over the past two decades—financial, health-related, and geopolitical—the relationship between fiscal sustainability and community resilience has gained increasing attention in both economic scholarship and European institutional debates. The aim of this article is to examine the linkage between fiscal sustainability and the resilience of local communities through an integrated approach that combines cross-country analysis at the European Union level with an in-depth assessment of Romania’s experience. The study relies on Eurostat data covering the period 2015 2023 and focuses on fiscal indicators, the degree of fiscal decentralization, and the capacity of local communities to translate public resources into economic and institutional resilience. The methodological framework includes descriptive and comparative analysis, alongside the construction of a composite Community Resilience Index. The empirical findings reveal substantial disparities across EU Member States and indicate that fiscal sustainability, when accompanied by functional fiscal decentralization and strategically oriented public investment, is associated with higher levels of community resilience. In the case of Romania, the gap between a relatively moderate level of public debt and comparatively low community resilience is largely explained by limited local fiscal autonomy and persistent institutional constraints.
PURPOSE: The purpose of this concept paper is to address the role of governance in the process of regional transition, by analyzing the concept of transition and its implications for regional sustainability, and highlighting their socio-technical, institutional, and governance dimensions. METHOD: This study is based on the selected review of the literature providing insights into sustainability transitions, regional development, and decentralization. FINDINGS: Transition is a long-term, multidimensional shift shaped by innovation, societal pressures, and governance structures. Regional transitions integrate development and sustainability agendas but often face barriers such as technocratic bias, limited social participation, and misaligned public finance. Decentralization models ‒ political, fiscal, and administrative ‒ shape how regions navigate these transitions. ORIGINALITY/VALUE: The study synthesizes transition theory with regional development and decentralization frameworks, offering an integrated perspective on how governance arrangements influence sustainable regional transformation. KEYWORDS: governance, regional transition, decentralization. JEL: R11, R58.
At present, social capital is considered to be one of the important reasons for promoting economic development and causing regional economic differences, but in the existing research, there is little literature on the impact of regional social capital on enterprises’ green innovation behavior and green total factor productivity (GTFP), so this paper aims to enrich the research in this area. This paper builds a regional social capital evaluation index system and uses the super-SBM model to measure the enterprise GTFP. Then, this paper brings regional social capital, enterprise green innovation and GTFP into a unified framework for the first time and further reveals the quantitative relationship between the three by using OLS and Tobit two-step methods based on the panel data of 30 provinces from 2011 to 2019. The results show that regional social capital has a positive effect on enterprise GTFP and green innovation (except for strategic green innovation output), enterprise green innovation output has a positive role in promoting GTFP, and enterprise green innovation capital investment has a masking effect between regional social capital and GTFP. Furthermore, the expansive study finds that there are differences in the impact of regional social capital on green innovation and the GTFP of heterogeneous enterprises, and financing constraints have a positive regulatory effect on the relationship between regional social capital and the GTFP of state-owned enterprises, while having an inhibitory effect on the GTFP of private enterprises. Fiscal decentralization has a partial mediating effect between regional social capital and enterprise GTFP, while urbanization and CO2 emissions have a masking effect. Additionally, this paper aims to provide a reference for the improvement of regional social capital theory, the strategic choice of green innovation of enterprises, and the high-quality development of the economy.
Abstract How might the structure of banking affect economic resilience? We address this question by analyzing how the organizational structures of banks and banking markets were associated with unemployment trajectories in local economies during the Great Recession. Two county-level analyses yield convergent results. Increasing branch densities of giant derivative holding banks within local economies were associated with greater surges in unemployment, weaker employment recoveries and stronger recession effects on unemployment from 2007 through 2016. Increasing branch densities of community banks and credit unions and localism in banking were associated with lower unemployment spikes, stronger recoveries and dampened crisis effects. These findings advance sociological studies of finance by providing new quantitative evidence for links between the social structures of banking and economic performance. They also confound arguments that decentralized systems of small, locally based financial institutions are inherently fragile by design, suggesting instead that alternatives to ‘too-big-to-fail’ banking can enhance local economies’ capacities to adapt proactively, withstand crisis and sustain employment during recessions.
The creative economy has attracted increasing attention from academia and policymakers for more than two decades. However, despite the flourishing literature on this topic, its complex connection with development and its role in strengthening resilience are yet to be properly examined. The paper addresses this issue by investigating how different cities in Romania, with a different intensity of creative industries, have managed to resist and to recover from the aftermath of the Great Recession. Our findings reveal that, as a whole, creative industries strengthen urban resistance against a recession, but do not necessarily fasten urban recovery. As our results suggest, this might be due to the asymmetrical impact across different groups of creative industries. Besides a creative economy proliferation, other factors are also identified as significant resilience drivers. Whilst a better access to healthcare services, higher local investments and a higher decentralization of local budgets appear to enhance the cities’ resistance, higher shares of agriculture and finance, as well as a higher income per capita appear to correlate with a faster urban recovery.
Crises frequently weaken subnational governments but in some cases they lead to greater decentralization. Does this decentralization, however, support the search for optimal crisis response strategies? Generally speaking there are several arguments, which suggest that decentralized systems will manage crises better than centralized ones. This article, however, considers two scenarios (decentralization of weakness and decentralization of responsibility) where the apparently increasing autonomy of subnational governments leads to important problems. Decentralization of weakness emerges when the central government for certain reasons refuses to actively implement an anti-crisis policy. Under these conditions, regional measures, while to some extent compensating the inactivity of the central government, create a number of other problems -that of external effects, possible ideologization of politics and insufficient use of expert knowledge. Decentralization of responsibility emerges when regions accept responsibility for implementing anti-crisis measures, but the center keeps control over resources -thus, regions have to focus on competing for central financing. For the modern Russia, the risks of these two scenarios are substantial.
Crises frequently weaken subnational governments but in some cases they lead to greater decentralization. Does this decentralization, however, support the search for optimal crisis response strategies? Generally speaking there are several arguments, which suggest that decentralized systems will manage crises better than centralized ones. This article, however, considers two scenarios (decentralization of weakness and decentralization of responsibility) where the apparently increasing autonomy of subnational governments leads to important problems. Decentralization of weakness emerges when the central government for certain reasons refuses to actively implement an anti-crisis policy. Under these conditions, regional measures, while to some extent compensating the inactivity of the central government, create a number of other problems - that of external effects, possible ideologization of politics and insufficient use of expert knowledge. Decentralization of responsibility emerges when regions accept responsibility for implementing anti-crisis measures, but the center keeps control over resources - thus, regions have to focus on competing for central financing. For the modern Russia, the risks of these two scenarios are substantial.
Studies of resilience highlight the tension between actions that allow a firm – and a system – to be robust and those that allows it to be flexible. Studies suggest that an entrepreneurial firm will prioritize flexibility, given resource constraints. However, what occurs when a number of firms are embedded in a common socio-technical system and an extreme event affects them collectively? This paper tests whether existing theory about resilience predicts the responses of entrepreneurs in such a system, with reference to an extreme event in the Bitcoin socio-technical system: the much-publicized bankruptcy of Mt.Gox, a key player. It relies on in-depth interviews with 8 entrepreneurs in Europe, triangulated with other data. We find that robustness is the dominant strategy for those interviewed. This is partly because the firms rely on pooled resources supplied by the collective, and partly because robustness builds trust, giving the firms a competitive advantage.
There is broad agreement among economists and policy makers that economic growth is nowadays largely driven by the capacity of firms to innovate. The financial and economic crisis that started in late 2007 has had a far reaching impact on countries around the world. Spain has been one of the countries worst affected. As a result, the government has reduced public funding in R&D. At the same time, the continued credit crunch has dramatically worsened the possibilities for financing new ideas and projects. One of the consequences of the economic crisis is that many companies have reduced their innovation-related activities; however, some firms have been more resilient than others and recent studies also show that there are important differences across countries regarding the degree to which the economic crisis has affected firms? innovation investment. It has been argued that national institutional settings and the structural characteristics of national innovation systems have played an important role in shaping how firms have responded to the crisis. However, within a country, regions may also matter. Learning processes underlying innovation are localised and locally embedded, and regional innovation systems (hereafter, RISs) may play a role too. Spain provides an interesting setting for analysing the role of regions, as it is a country with a highly decentralized unitary state with a unique framework of territorial administration. Spanish regions have very diverse economies and also different degrees of fiscal and political autonomy. They vary greatly in terms of their innovation performance as well as regarding their regional innovation and technology policies. Moreover, their responses to the economic crisis in terms of regional policies have not been the same. A focus on regional difference can contribute to a better understanding of the innovation strategies employed by firms during the crisis. To date, we still know very little about regional differences and the degree to which regions have shaped firms' innovation behaviour in response to the economic crisis. Our analysis contributes to this literature by drawing on a large national sample of micro-data for Spanish manufacturing and service sector firms. Our results show that the crisis has discouraged a significant number of firms from engaging in innovation. These have been mainly small firms and occasional R&D performers. Significant regional differences are also found in the degree to which the crisis has affected firms? innovation expenditures, even after controlling for sectoral differences and firms? structural characteristics. The Basque Country stands out in our analysis. Firms with R&D employment in this region show a significantly lower probability of having abandoned innovation activities and a somewhat higher probability of even having increased their innovation effort. This regional effect has been especially important for small and medium sized companies.