We investigate how financial repression affects financial development of Bangladesh over the period 1980-2022. Employing VECM, we find that repression policies negatively affect financial development, meaning that controlling the financial sector counteracts financial progress. Following the results, we recommend some policies. To accelerate financial progress, policymakers need to rethink on these restrictive policy instruments. For emerging nations like Bangladesh, this paper offers the first empirical data on the connection between financial repression and financial development.

Purpose: There is a strong prerequisite for organizations to analyze customer review behavior to evaluate the competitive business environment. The purpose of this study is to analyze and predict customer reviews of halal restaurants using machine learning (ML) approaches. Design/methodology/approach: The authors collected customer review data from the Yelp website. The authors filtered the reviews of only halal restaurants from the original data set. Following cleaning, the filtered review texts were classified as positive, neutral or negative sentiments, and those sentiments were scored using the AFINN and VADER sentiment algorithms. Also, the current study applies four machine learning methods to classify each review toward halal restaurants into its sentiment class. Findings: The experiment showed that most of the customer reviews toward halal restaurants were positive. The authors also discovered that all of the methods (decision tree, linear support vector machine, logistic regression and random forest classifier) can correctly classify the review text into sentiment class, but logistic regression outperforms the others in terms of accuracy. Practical implications: The results facilitate halal restaurateurs in identifying customer review behavior. Social implications: Sentiment and emotions, according to appraisal theory, form the basis for all interactions, facilitating cognitive functions and supporting prospective customers in making sense of experiences. Emotion theory also describes human affective states that determine motives and actions. The study looks at how potential customers might react to a halal restaurant’s consensus on social media based on reviewers’ opinions of halal restaurants because emotions can be conveyed through reviews. Originality/value: This study applies machine learning approaches to analyze and predict customer sentiment based on the review texts toward halal restaurants.

This study examines the causal relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and economic growth in China over a 40-year period, from 1981 to 2020. Using a vector autoregressive (VAR) model, the study investigates the direction of causality between FDI and economic growth and finds that economic growth drives FDI inflows in China, rather than the other way around. The results suggest that policymakers should prioritize growth policies that foster sustainable economic expansion, rather than focusing solely on attracting FDI. The study contributes to the literature on the relationship between FDI and economic growth and highlights the importance of understanding the direction of causality between these two variables. Overall, these findings have important implications for policymakers seeking to promote economic growth and attract FDI to China.

Our article on the study of the “Resource Curse” in Chinese provinces, was written with two objectives. First, by reviewing the international and Chinese literature and analyzing the economic development of the relevant Chinese provinces, we sought to explore whether the resource curse phenomenon exists or can be demonstrated. And second, we want to draw the reader's attention to the fact that Chinese and Asian economies in general have central planning models, the main purpose of which is to define and focus on national economic development priorities. The sub-divisions of the central development plans include development targets for each region, which naturally take into account the economic performance of each province and the factors that determine it. It follows from the latter line of thinking that the economic development of the four Chinese provinces concerned (Gansu, Guizhou, Qinghai and Shanxi) cannot be interpreted in a 'piecemeal' way, based solely on the existence or otherwise of the resource curse phenomenon. In writing this article, we also wish to draw attention to this holistic, comprehensive Chinese (Asian) way of thinking.