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ABSTRACT & RÉSUMÉ & ZUSAMMENFASSUNG : Dark clouds over the EU-Africa Summit 2021 in view of Brexit and Corona ---- Every three years, the AU-EU summit reunites African and EU leaders to outline the future direction of cooperation. The 6th summit had been to reaffirm and renew the partnership between the two blocks already in October 2020, but it was pushed back to the first quarter of 2021 or even later due to COVID-19 crisis. Besides, Brussels had to deal with its own post-Brexit situation and its repercussions on EU-Africa relations, excluding the UK. African states, for their part, wanted to renegotiate the EU-Africa partnership and to balance it with new promising Post-Brexit visions of the British premier Johnson about increased economic ties with the African Angloshere. China and other global players compete with the EU and its member states in the new scramble for African resources. Given that Africa is increasingly courted by other partners it could be inclined to successively limit its relations with the EU and see it as a mere provider of aid and security against Islamic terrorism. This trend was reinforced by the fact that the new EU-Africa strategy still hasn't been approved by EU member states. And a timely replacement of the Cotonou Agreement, which expires in November 2021, is open to question. ___________________________________________________________________________ RÉSUMÉ : Tous les trois ans, le sommet UA-UE réunit les dirigeants africains et européens pour définir l'orientation future de la coopération. Le 6e sommet devait réaffirmer et renouveler le partenariat entre les deux blocs déjà en octobre 2020, mais il a été repoussé au premier trimestre 2021, ou même plus tard, en raison de la crise du COVID-19. En outre, Bruxelles a dû faire face à sa propre situation post-Brexit, compte tenu l'exclusion du Royaume-Uni, et à ses répercussions sur les relations UE-Afrique. Les États africains, pour leur part, souhaitaient renégocier le partenariat UE-Afrique, et l'équilibrer avec les nouvelles visions post-Brexit prometteuses du Premier ministre britannique Johnson sur le renforcement des liens économiques avec l'Anglosphère africaine. La Chine et d'autres acteurs mondiaux sont en concurrence avec l'UE et ses États membre dans la nouvelle ruée vers les ressources africaines. Étant donné que l'Afrique est de plus en plus courtisée par d'autres partenaires, elle pourrait être encline à limiter successivement ses relations avec l'UE et à la considérer comme un simple fournisseur d'aide et de sécurité contre le terrorisme islamique. Cette tendance a été renforcée par le fait que la nouvelle stratégie UE-Afrique n'a toujours pas été approuvée par les États membres de l'UE. Et un remplacement opportun de l'accord de Cotonou, qui expire en novembre 2021, est sujet à caution. _____________________________________________________________________ ZUSAMMENFASSUNG : Alle drei Jahre bringt der AU-EU Gipfel afrikanische und EU-Staats- und Regierungschefs zusammen, um die künftige Richtung der Zusammenarbeit zu skizzieren. Der 6. Gipfel hatte sich zum Ziel gesetzt, die Partnerschaft zwischen den beiden Blöcken bereits im Oktober 2020 zu bekräftigen und zu erneuern, er wurde jedoch aufgrund der COVID-19-Krise auf das erste Quartal 2021 verschoben. Davon unabhängig mußte sich Brüssel erst einmal über seine eigene Situation nach dem Brexit und dessen Auswirkungen auf die Beziehungen zwischen der EU und Afrika klar werden. Die afrikanischen Staaten ihrerseits wollen die Partnerschaft zwischen der EU und Afrika neu verhandeln und sie mit den vielversprechenden Visionen des britischen Premierministers Boris Johnson über verstärkte wirtschaftliche Beziehungen zur afrikanischen Anglosphäre in Einklang bringen. Zudem konkurrieren China und andere Global Player mit der EU und ihren Mitgliedstaaten im Kampf um afrikanische Ressourcen. Angesichts der Tatsache, daß Afrika zunehmend von anderen Partnern umworben wird, könnten seine Führer dazu neigen, ihre Beziehungen zur EU sukzessive einzuschränken und die EU auf ihre Funktion als Anbieter von Hilfe und Sicherheit gegen den islamischen Terrorismus zu begrenzen. Dieser Trend wird noch dadurch verstärkt, daß eine gemeinsame EU-Afrika-Strategie von den EU-Mitgliedstaaten noch nicht einmal verabschiedet wurde. Selbst der rechtzeitige Ersatz des Cotonou-Abkommens, das im November 2021 ausläuft, ist fraglich.

Purpose – The COVID-19 has brought with it valuable opportunities for the retail sector. Notably, online channels have assumed a key role for businesses that can rely less on physical channels due to the pandemic’s restrictions. Within this context, the study aims to identify the main antecedents leading to the formation of the male and female customers’ continuance intention of using online food delivery services (OFDS) in the restaurant industry. Design/methodology/approach – A web-based self-completion survey and a subsequent structural equation modelling have been employed on a sample of 360 participants. Findings – Findings reveal that perceived healthiness, quarantine procedures, perceived hygiene, perceived ease of app use and attitude significantly influence continuance intention. Moreover, the moderator analysis corroborates that male consumers’ continuance intention is mainly influenced by perceived healthiness, quarantine procedures and perceived hygiene. Conversely, female customers’ continuance intention is predicated on perceived healthiness and attitude. Research limitations/implications – Although the adoption of a sample of young customers (18–29 years) guarantees good research internal validity, findings are not generalizable. Practical implications – The study provides valuable contributions for restaurants related to the (1) creation/management of their own OFDS platforms; (2) selection of the right third-party platforms. Originality/value – The paper is one of the first studies examining the predictors impacting on customers’ OFDS continuance intention in the COVID-19 context by also focusing on gender differences.

There is an intrinsic and mutualistic dependence between the bio-economic performance of banks and that of enterprises. This supposition is supported by correlations identified in a comprehensive analysis of the Italian banking sector, which reveal particularly strong relations between financial intermediaries and smaller enterprises. Concentrating on developments within the bank-enterprise system (and by extension, in households), we discuss the positive effects, including on macroeconomics, generated when the banking sector supplies funding to productive infrastructure to understand how the industry remains healthy and efficient. The negative effects produced by the disappearance of such a cycle are also considered. This paper thus presents a mathematical argument through dynamic modelling to evaluate the structural trends in bank and company populations that result from more and less expansive credit strategies assumed by banks. Empirical observations of this data also reflect the critical stress factor of the (micro)enterprise population that allows it to generate positive economic variations as financial leverage decreases. The ensuing assessment of stable and unstable points of equilibrium as well as bifurcations and their irreversibility (hysteresis) reveals that banks have stagnating profits and increasing numbers of non-performing loans. Finally, we investigate the possibility of an optimal minimum level of credit leverage and how to improve the stabilizing measures that are conferred to the system itself, especially given the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

We elicited incentivized and stated measures of risk and time preferences from a sample of undergraduate students in Athens, Greece, as part of a battery of psychological, behavioral and economic measures and traits that could be later matched with data from laboratory experiments. Data collection for these measures was first initiated in 2017 and the exact same battery of measures was administered in 2019 and early 2020 to students of the university that had voluntarily enrolled to participate in surveys/experiments. About halfway through the 2020 wave, our study was re-designed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. We re-launched our study on March 23, 2020, coinciding with a general curfew imposed by the government, and invited back all subjects that had participated in the 2019 and the early 2020 wave. The exact same sets of incentivized and stated measures of risk and time preferences were administered to the invited subjects and the wave duration was extended until a few weeks after the opening up of the economy and restart of business activity that followed the curfew. We then estimated structural parameters for various theories of risk and time preferences from the incentivized tasks and find no effect between the different waves or other key events of the pandemic, despite the fact that we have about 1,000 responses across all waves. Similar conclusions come out of the stated preferences measures. Overall, our subjects exhibit intertemporal stability of risk and time preferences despite the very disruptive effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on the global economy.

The present research conducts a formal analysis of the interactive decisions concerning the enterprise of COVID-19 vaccination on the part of governments and citizens. It specifically constructs a non-cooperative static game with complete information between the citizen and the government encompassing the strategies of vaccination and no vaccination with regard to the former and the strategies of direct imposition, subsistence restrictions, luxury restrictions and no imposition with regard to the latter. On account of its payoff structure the present analysis finds that the game in question presents one sole and strict pure strategy Nash equilibrium, being that of strategies no vaccination and no imposition, respectively. The core rationale is that the citizen accepts COVID-19 vaccination only if his survival is placed at risk, because of the inherent unlawfulness presented by COVID-19 vaccination, itself due to foetal exploitation and potentially adverse effects, thereby prompting the government not to impose it, lest individual integrity and societal rights be violated as well. It furthermore shows that the exogenous elimination of the no imposition strategy on the part of the government transforms the Nash equilibrium into that of strategies vaccination and direct imposition, respectively, as materially come to pass. It finally determines that the unlikely addition of the revolution strategy on the part of the citizen in the presence of the elimination of the no imposition strategy on the part of the government likewise admits one sole and strict pure strategy Nash equilibrium, either in strategies vaccination and direct imposition or in strategies revolution and direct imposition, respectively.

The paper analyses the interindustry spillover effects of bilateral trade conflicts using the example of the 2018-2019 China-USA bilateral trade war. Empirical results are produced using a new heuristic method based on hypothetical extraction and substitution in an International Input-Output model. This model tracts a series of direct and indirect sectoral effects and provides an intuitive and computationally tractable way of mapping the potential gains and losses affecting other trade partners. It sheds light on some intricate inter-industry implications that are not obvious when considering traditional trade models. A large share of the negative impacts may be felt by third countries through two separate trade channels. Firstly, because the production of a final product in one country relies on importing intermediate goods from other trade partners, who may be negatively impacted by the trade destruction effects of the trade embargo. Secondly, because trade embargoes lead to trade substitution in order to fill the gaps left by embargoed products, and to trade deflection. Deflection occurs when the trade belligerents redeploy their unsold exports towards third countries, increasing competition for market shares. This situation is an additional threat for the Multilateral Trade Governance as large-scale trade deflection may induce a cascade of Tit-for-Tat protectionist measures, in a situation where the COVID-19 pandemics has fanned the industrial nationalism, trade protectionism and geo-political tensions which were already perceptible since the global crisis of 2008-2009.

Abstract The issue of coronavirus outbreak in the world, though new, is equally pervasive. It has posed a new and ambiguous challenge to the economic growth of countries around the world. Undoubtedly, the efforts of countries to curb the spread of this virus and reduce the number of deaths are necessary for other strategies that will be taken in other areas, especially in the economic field. Comparing countries only based on the statistics on virus spread and mortality without considering the contextual variables, can be misleading. Thus using dynamic data envelopment analysis, this study calculated the performance of 19 selected countries in two dimensions: inefficiency of preventing coronavirus spread and inefficiency of preventing deaths caused by a coronavirus from February 2 to April 12. According to the study, the inefficiency trend of preventing coronavirus spread in Singapore, South Korea, China, and Australia are decreasing during the period under review and the inefficiency trend of other countries, which of course differ in terms of inefficiency, are increasing with different slopes. Also, Australia, Finland, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand have experienced less inefficiency in preventing deaths caused by coronavirus compared to other countries. Stringency index and global health security (GHS) index have been used as well, to analyze the findings and in the end some suggestions have been presented.

Mortality shocks such as the one induced by the COVID-19 pandemic have substantial impact on mortality models. We describe how to deal with them in the period effect of the Lee-Carter model. The main idea is to not rely on the usual normal distribution assumption as it is not always justified. We consider a mixture distribution model based on the peaks- over-threshold method, a jump model and a regime switching model and introduce a modified calibration procedure to account for the fact that varying amounts of data are necessary for calibrating different parts of these models. We perform an extensive empirical study for nine European countries, comparing the models with respect to their parameters, goodness of fit and forecasting performance. Moreover, we define five exemplary scenarios regarding the future development of pandemic-related mortality. As a result of our evaluations, we recommend the peaks-over-threshold approach for applications with a possibility of extreme mortality events.

Global challenges like climate change, food security, and infectious diseases such as the COVID-19 pandemic are nearly impossible to tackle when established experts and upstart innovators work in silos. If research organizations, governments, universities, NGOs, and the private sector could collaborate on these challenges more easily, lasting solutions would certainly come more quickly. Aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, SAIRA connects key players in different arenas: scientists and engineers at research and technology organizations (RTOs) looking to collaborate on sustainable development projects, companies seeking R&D support to tackle their most challenging problems, and startups with innovative ideas and a desire to scale. The platform is a blockchain-secured open innovation platform, anchored on Max Plank Digital Library's blockchain network bloxberg, that assures the authenticity and integrity of all user-generated content and collaboration processes.

The confinement caused by Covid-19, and the associated promotion of telework to reduce exposure of workers to the disease, have clear implications for worker daily behaviors and well-being. This paper empirically explores the differences between commuters’ and teleworkers’ time allocations during their workdays, and the instant enjoyment experienced while doing such activities, with a focus on gender differences. Using detailed information from the UK Time Use Survey for the years 2014-2015, the results show a statistically significant cut in female and male paid work time associated with teleworking. On the other hand, teleworkers spend more time than commuters in unpaid work and leisure activities. The results also reveal a cut in women’s experienced enjoyment while doing telework, while male teleworkers enjoy their leisure more than do commuters. These results suggest that confinement policies promoting teleworking may impact not only worker time allocations, but also individual well-being, and such an impact may differ between men and women, leading to intrahousehold imbalances.