اسماعیل حافظی

In international trade and financial exchanges, global cryptocurrencies have a prominent and effective role. In this paper, using the KOF index, the structure of financial globalization is extracted and the effect of the expansion of global cryptocurrencies is examined in the two components: Foreign Direct Investment and Portfolio Investment. The Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model has been used separately for 2020, 2021, and 2022 to analyze the results of the expansion of global cryptocurrencies in the foreign direct investment component. Also, the price changes of Bitcoin and Ethereum from March 10, 2016, to the end of December 2022 have been used to investigate the effect of global cryptocurrencies in portfolio investment by applying Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT). Also, according to the availability of data in research sources, the data of 111 countries have been used. OLS estimated results suggest that the adoption and expansion of global cryptocurrencies has no significant relationship with Foreign Direct Investment. Also, using MPT, the results of portfolio optimization suggest that global cryptocurrencies improve the effectiveness of the selected portfolios, and with the same corresponding returns, the risk of the portfolios including global cryptocurrencies decreases as well. Therefore, the results emphasize the role of global cryptocurrencies in financial globalization only as crypto-assets.

The technological revolution has spread over today's world, and it is clearly seen in banking, especially electronic banking. E-Banking has many dimensions, criteria, and components, and judging its progress based on dimensions leads to difficulty and bias. There is also a lack of comprehensive information references in the literature. Therefore, introducing a combinational index to accurately assess its progress is inevitable. In this research, the E-Banking Progress Index (E-BPI), which focuses on the infrastructures and the tools of e-banking and has five dimensions: Technical and Communicational Infrastructures; Services; Cultural-Educational Infrastructures; Security and Supervision; and Legal-Regulatory Infrastructures is created. It also has several applications in investigating the progress of e-banking in a bank or a country and comparing it among banks or countries. This research, using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), leads to the introduction of a combinational index to measure the progress of e-banking, which is able to analyze its strength and weakness. E-BPI provides a score between 0 and 1. The more the score, the stronger the e-banking is.