Journal of Economics Business Industry

When Vision Outpaces Data: Dual Model Forecasts of Malawi's Path to Lower Middle Income Status by 2030

Chikondi Banda — 2026-08-31

Malawi's First Ten Year Implementation Plan aims to lift the country from low income to lower middle income status by 2030, but ongoing inflation, a weakening currency, slow growth in income per person, and repeated economic shocks make this goal look doubtful. This study checks whether Malawi can actually reach that 2030 income target if its current economic path continues. Yearly economic data from 1990 to 2024, along with a shorter set of data from 2005 to 2024 taken after a major shift in the economy, were studied using two forecasting models, a Vector Autoregression (VAR) model and a Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model built for a small open economy. Statistical tests called Chow and CUSUM show that the economy went through a period of instability around 2001 to 2002, and further checks confirm that the models produce reliable and stable results. The forecasts show that Malawi's total economic output in 2030 will likely fall between seventeen point six and twenty three point one billion US dollars using the longer data set, and between fifteen point four and sixteen billion dollars using the shorter one. In every version of the model, income per person is expected to reach only around six hundred thirty seven to nine hundred fifty six dollars, still below the one thousand one hundred seventy six dollar mark needed for lower middle income status. The two models agree most closely when using the shorter, more recent data set, pointing to a more trustworthy estimate of about six hundred thirty seven to six hundred sixty three dollars per person by 2030. These results suggest that Malawi is unlikely to reach lower middle income status by 2030 unless there is a major change from its past growth pattern. This study adds value by comparing two very different types of forecasting models across two time periods, and it points to the need for steady real growth, lower inflation, a more stable currency, more varied exports, and changes that make the economy more productive.

Trade Leadership without Monetary Convergence: Türkiye's Integration with the OIC

Zeynep Arslan — 2026-08-31

Monetary integration among Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) member countries has long attracted academic attention, yet empirical studies specifically targeting Türkiye, an economically and institutionally significant OIC member, remain limited. This study reassesses the feasibility of monetary integration between Türkiye and the OIC using updated conditions through 2025, along with its explanatory factors. Applying the Optimum Currency Area (OCA) index of Bayoumi and Eichengreen to forty-three Türkiye-OIC bilateral pairs across three ten-year periods, each pair is classified into prime converged, converging, or little converged categories, after which four explanatory criteria, namely business cycle synchronization, inflation similarity, intra trade openness, and economic size, are tested through a panel fixed effect regression. The results show that Türkiye achieves prime or converging status with only about fifty-one percent of its OIC partners, comprising ten prime converged pairs, twelve converging pairs, and twenty-one little converged pairs, a considerably smaller share than the near universal convergence reported in the benchmark study on Indonesia. The panel regression confirms inflation similarity as the only variable significant at the 1 percent level, with the model explaining roughly sixty-four percent of the variation in bilateral symmetry (adjusted R squared of 0.64), while business cycle synchronization, trade openness, and economic size are not significant. These findings indicate that Türkiye's persistently high inflation differential and the lira's chronic depreciation are the principal obstacles to its currency symmetry with the OIC, even as its trade leadership continues to strengthen through its 2025 COMCEC chairmanship. This study confirms that trade leadership can outpace monetary integration, and that domestic price stability, rather than trade diversification, is the precondition for deepening it.

Beyond Fertilizer Alone: How Extension Access Shapes the Productivity Payoff of Tanzania's Fertilizer Subsidy Program

Amani Joseph Mwakalobo — 2026-08-31

Maize production in Tanzania surged after the Fertilizer Subsidy Program was relaunched in 2022/23, yet the rise in yield per hectare remained modest, suggesting that this surge was driven more by land expansion and added input than by lasting productivity improvement. Earlier studies on fertilizer subsidy and extension services in Tanzania have generally examined the two policies separately or relied on data from before the current subsidy program began, leaving it unclear whether extension services strengthen the benefit of subsidy for maize farm efficiency. This study assesses the interactive effect of extension access and participation in the Fertilizer Subsidy Program on maize production and technical efficiency among farming households in Tanzania. The study uses data from the 2023/24 Annual Agricultural Sample Survey, covering 7,850 maize farming households across seven agro ecological zones, analyzed through a Cobb Douglas stochastic frontier production function model, which places an interaction term between subsidy and extension inside both the inefficiency model and the production uncertainty model, together with an instrumental variable approach to address the endogeneity of subsidy participation. The results show an average technical efficiency of about 0.58 among farmers, meaning yield could still rise by about 42 percent without any extra input. Extension access and subsidy beneficiary status, taken separately, raise yield by about 0.842 percent and 3.124 percent respectively, while the combination of the two raises yield by up to 4.253 percent, exceeding the sum of the two separate effects. A similar pattern appears in the reduction of yield uncertainty. These findings show that extension acts as a catalyst that strengthens the benefit of the subsidy. The implication is that the Tanzania Fertilizer Regulatory Authority and the Ministry of Agriculture should design the Fertilizer Subsidy Program as an integrated policy package combined with stronger extension services, so that the production targets under Agenda 10/30 rest on lasting productivity rather than mere land and input expansion.

The Cost of Living Squeeze: How Rising Food, Housing, and Transport Prices Reshape Household Spending

Nurul Atika Willy — 2026-08-31

Household spending in Indonesia has become increasingly concentrated on three basic needs, namely food, housing, and transport, which together absorb roughly four fifths of the average household's monthly budget across 2018 to 2024. This pattern is particularly concerning because food's share of spending has actually risen, from 49.5 to 50.1 percent, even as income has grown, running counter to Engel's Law, which predicts that food's budget share should fall as income rises. This study aims to test whether a rising budget share for food, housing, and transport crowds out household spending across ten other expenditure categories. The study uses household expenditure data based on the National Socioeconomic Survey conducted by Statistics Indonesia, covering 14,700 households, analyzed through three systems of conditional Engel curves, each treating food, housing, and transport in turn as the source of budget pressure, estimated using a seemingly unrelated regression approach that reduces to equation by equation ordinary least squares because every equation shares an identical set of explanatory variables. The results show that twenty nine of the thirty relationships tested are negative and statistically significant. The largest displacement effect occurs between housing and food, where a one percentage point rise in housing's share reduces food's share by 0.573 percentage points, while health and education remain significantly crowded out by all three sources of pressure, despite the existence of Jaminan Kesehatan Nasional and Kartu Indonesia Pintar. These findings indicate that cost of living pressure in Indonesia is structural and pervasive, rather than being driven by any single expenditure category. The implication is that price stabilization policies for food, housing, and transport need to be designed in an integrated manner and paired with better targeted social protection, particularly for health and education.

The Rupiah Under Repeated Stress: A VAR Analysis of Its Interdependence with ASEAN and Developed Currency Markets

Desi Sintyasari — 2026-08-31

Between 2020 and 2025, the Indonesian Rupiah weakened from an average of IDR15,287 per US Dollar to a low of IDR17,465 in April 2025, its weakest level since 1998, after passing through the Covid-19 shock, the Federal Reserve's steepest tightening cycle in four decades, and the 2025 tariff shock in succession. How closely these repeated pressures tied the Rupiah to its regional and developed-market counterparts remains unclear, since existing studies either stop short of 2025 or treat the Rupiah as one of many currencies in broad regional panels rather than as the central focus. This study addresses that gap by estimating a seven-variable vector autoregression on monthly data from January 2020 to December 2025, covering the Rupiah, the Malaysian Ringgit, the Philippine Peso, the Singapore Dollar, the Thai Baht, the Japanese Yen, and the Euro, and applying generalised impulse response functions and generalised forecast error variance decomposition to trace how shocks in each currency transmit to the others. The results show that the Rupiah's own shocks explain only 25.7 percent of its variance from the third month onward, while the four ASEAN currencies jointly explain 56.1 percent, led by the Singapore Dollar at 17.6 percent, compared with just 18.1 percent from the Euro and Yen combined. The Rupiah's correlation with the Euro is positive, while its correlation with the Yen is negative, revealing an uneven relationship with developed markets. These findings suggest that Indonesian monetary authorities have limited capacity to manage exchange rate stability through domestic measures alone, and that closer regional monitoring, particularly of Singapore, may offer more practical value than comparable attention to developed-market currencies.