The Impact of Government Effectiveness on Trade and Financial Openness: The Generalized Quantile Panel Regression Approach

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The research offer interesting studies. However, the authors fail to deliver and present their ideas in their writing.

A lot technical issues detected in this paper.

And i feel that the work is done in a rush.

Here the list of recommendation for the authors

1. Issue in introduction should be clear and interesting. Ensure you have a data to supports the problem.

2. The citation in introduction should be recent one.

3. Do not combine introduction and literature review in one section. Your introduction is not interesting because the writer emphasize more on the past studies

4. Explain in more detail the selection of your country

In methodology section

Please explain the origin of your model. How it is expanded into your version. What is the new addition to this model? The novelty must be clear.

Result and discussion

The series of analysis must be complete. The writer need to be more particular in explaining all the analysis before showing the final test.

Conclusion

Conclusion is weak and insufficient. The writer does not take an effort to explain in detail the policy that are suitable based on their income.

Overall, this paper is not reach the standard set by MDPI journal. More work need to be done to improve its quality.

Author Response

Good day Review 
Thank you so much for the constructive review and assist us in improving our paper. 
Kindly find attached the cover letter addressing the review comments and the updated manuscript included separately. 
We appreciate your contribution to our paper. 
Kind regards. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

1. In the article The Impact of Government Effectiveness on Trade and Financial Openness: The Generalized Quantile Panel Regression Approach, the most important results are presented in Table 4 (Table 4: Generalized Quantile Panel Regression Results for Government Effectiveness as GE=f (TO, FO)), which is related to modeling the impact of trade and financial openness on government effectiveness using generalized panel quantile regression variables for 35 selected countries.
Unfortunately, the excessive brevity of the results obtained from Table 4 does not allow us to assess the quality of the intermediate results, which were not included in the mentioned table.

2. As a wish, the intermediate steps of the results obtained in Table 4 need to be expanded or clarified somewhat, since it is on the basis of these that far-reaching suggestions and recommendations are further made to policymakers in implementing more effective economic and managerial policies that can enhance the impact of trade and financial openness on government effectiveness.

Author Response

Good day Prof

Thank you so much for the constructive review and assist us in improving our paper. 

Kindly find attached the cover letter addressing the review comments and the updated manuscript included separately. 

We appreciate your contribution to our paper. 

Kind regards. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper addresses an interesting topic about the Impact of government effectiveness on trade and financial openness using a methodology relatively new. My concerns are the following, and I request the authors to improve their 

1. Literature needs to be improved. Newer publications should be included, I recommend having a ratio of 60-40 between publications from no longer than five years and older studies.

2. The selected sample needs to have a more explicit reason for selecting them. It needs to identify and classify the countries included in the study and the characteristics considered.

3. I recommend including a diagram where the main characteristics of each country are included rather than a raw list.

4. There's a need to differentiate the theoretical information and specify what hypotheses are trying to prove using the selected methodology.

5. Include an author's table where there should be included information for each variable and for previous studies to support your methodology

6. There's a need to clarify the terms used in your results, such as "well-established state bureaucracy",  "a historically strong state tradition",  "international integration". These concepts should be included in the literature review and previous studies analysis.

7. In which way can governments benefit from this study? to which the "decision-making process" are you referring in your practical implications section?

This paper is interesting, but it seems that it needs a strong improvement in theoretical background, hypotheses definition, concept description, sample identification and characterization, previous studies analysis, reference updates, results analysis, and practical implications description.

Include diagrams to explain: 1. theoretical model, 2, selected methodology, 3. practical implication, and 4. main results and future work.

The subject is very interesting, but to my perspective, it needs to have strong improvement and be resubmitted for a second revision.

Author Response

Good day Prof

Thank you so much for the constructive review and assist us in improving our paper. 

Kindly find attached the cover letter addressing the review comments and the updated manuscript included separately. 

We appreciate your contribution to our paper. 

Kind regards. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors. Well done for your revised manuscript. There are few recommendations for your paper

1. Your highlighted the issues address in introduction can be more interesting if you are able to explain the specific problem arises (real issues) that related to government effectiveness on trade and financial issues. lets say in the context on least developed, developing and developed countries (which related to your sample countries). You can support the issues with the trend, series of event that lead contraction of the economy etc.

2. At the end of literature review section, you can highlight all types of gaps (perhaps replacing the gaps that you mention in introduction to this section)

3. In methodology part, please explain the theories and expected sign between the independent variable to dependent variable (equation 3). Do you log your data?

4.  In discussion part, justify the relationship with the past studies. 

5. Policy recommendation is not sufficient. Please enhance this part. 

6. Check your references format

Author Response

Good day Prof 

Thank you so much for the review comments and suggestions.

Please find attached response to review comments. 

Regards, 

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

After reviewing the recommendations given to the authors I came to the following recommendations:

1. Review your references, it seems that there are punctuations and separators between one reference and the other missing. Eg.  page 20 line 69, page 21 line 84, review all of them.

2. Confirm the ratio 60/40 between references with 5-6 years of publication at the most. It seems that this paper haven't follow this recommendation.

3. The authors need to complete the "Acknowledgements" section

4. Conclusion section should compare this paper's findings with previous studies and make a reference to the initial goals and purposes.

5. Between pages 8 and 9, the format of the paper is unequal, it needs to standardize to the journal's specifications.

6. It seems that the authors need to address the originality/value expressed in the abstract while explaining the findings in the conclusion section.

7. The authors need to review all the content of this paper to confirm the consistency between each section and each paragraph.

8. Differentiate hypotheses, objectives, findings in this two previous intentions and propose a graphical explanation of your research 

 

Author Response

Good day Prof

Thank you for the review comments and suggestions 

Please find attached responses to the comments made. 

Regards, 

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 3

Reviewer 3 Report

After reviewing the changes made according to the recommendations, I have no more issues to raise in this version.

I do consider this version to be improved enough and no more requirements are asked at the minute.