Publications and Certifications
Tariff Refunds and the Consumer Justice Gap: The Tariff Refund Illusion, Distributional Injustice, and the Limits of Importer-Centric Trade Remedy Law
Authors
Alieu Stephen KafoeMarymount University, USA
Bernadette Mualumatweh FohMarymount University, USA
Abstract
On February 20, 2026, the United States Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump, Nos. 24-1287 & 25-250, 607 U.S. ___ (2026), that tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) exceeded statutory authorization. The ruling immediately sparked a debate over refunds for an estimated $133.5 billion in assessed duties and up to $175 billion in total exposure. This commentary argues that this debate is fundamentally misframed: it conflates legal obligation, which remitted duties, with economic burden, which absorbed the cost. Drawing on tax incidence theory, distributional economics, sociological frameworks of structural inequality, and supply-chain analysis, this commentary establishes that between 86 and 96 percent of the IEEPA tariff burden was borne by U.S. firms and consumers, with tariff-attributable household costs estimated at $1,500-$1,800 in nominal 2025 dollars. The commentary further demonstrates that tariffs operate as a regressive fiscal instrument, disproportionately burdening low-income households, communities of color, and small businesses, and that the emerging refund architecture replicates this asymmetry by channeling restitution exclusively to importers and large businesses. This systematic disjunction between legal and equitable restitution is theorized as the consumer justice gap. The commentary concludes with a policy framework that encompasses conditional refund statutes, income-adjusted consumer tax credits, and Federal Trade Commission oversight, all designed to align restitution with economic harm.
Federal-State Conflict in Medicaid Governance: A Policy Analysis of the Trump Administration's 2026 Minnesota Medicaid Funding Withholding Actions and Implications for State Health Systems
Authors
Alieu Stephen KafoeDBA Candidate, Doctor of Business Administration Program, Marymount University, USA
Bernadette Mualumatweh FohEdD Student, Department of Education, Marymount University, USA
Abstract
Medicaid, the joint federal-state health insurance program for low-income Americans, covered an estimated 80 to 85 million individuals nationally as of early 2026, following the post-pandemic enrollment unwinding, and remains one of the largest intergovernmental fiscal partnerships in U.S. history. The Trump Administration’s 2026 series of escalating funding withholding and deferral actions against Minnesota’s Medicaid program, with a cumulative potential annual exposure exceeding $2.26 billion as of March 2026 represents, according to Minnesota’s filed federal complaint, an unusually large and highly contested use of federal Medicaid payment deferral authority described by the state as without precedent in categorical scope . This qualitative policy analysis examines the chronology, legal basis, empirical justification, and projected consequences for the health system and population health of these actions. Drawing on primary government sources, federal court filings, peer-reviewed health policy literature, and federal agency data, this paper argues that the administration’s funding withholding approach diverges from established cooperative federalism norms and the administrative law framework governing Medicaid compliance enforcement, creates disproportionate harm to clinically vulnerable beneficiary populations, and generates serious fiscal instability for a state whose 2025 Payment Error Rate Measurement (PERM) finding of 2.2% was substantially below the national rolling rate of 6.12%, though CMS cautions that state-specific PERM rates are not directly comparable across states due to methodological variation. Critically, the most prominent fraud case cited by the administration, Feeding Our Future, involved a federal child nutrition program, not Medicaid healthcare or insurance, raising serious questions about the analytic basis for applying Medicaid funding penalties in response to fraud in a programmatically distinct federal initiative. Integrating the health policy, organizational, and constitutional law literatures, the paper advances ten actionable policy recommendations that address fraud governance, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and the structural protection of Medicaid beneficiaries against deployment of conditional spending authority under contested legal circumstances.
Beyond Panacea: Digital Governance, AI, and the Political Economy of Public Benefit in African Development
Authors
Alieu Stephen KAFOE (corresponding author, stephenkafoe@yahoo.com), DBA Candidate, Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) Program, School of Business and Technology, Marymount University, Arlington, Virginia, United States of America
Bernadette Mualumatweh FOH, EdD Student, Department of Education, Marymount University, Arlington, Virginia, United States of America
Moses Amadu KAFOE, MBA Student, International Business Management, Hochschule Furtwangen University, Germany
Abstract
This paper examines who benefits from artificial intelligence (AI) governance frameworks in Sub-Saharan Africa and identifies the institutional conditions under which digital governance reforms generate public value rather than enabling elite capture, rent seeking, and technologically mediated dependency. Drawing on a critical synthesis of peerreviewed scholarship published between 2020 and 2025 and institutional evidence from major multilateral and practitioner sources, the study integrates four analytical lenses: decolonial and digital-colonial critique, public administration and policy learning, political economy of procurement and contracting, and Ubuntu-informed normative epistemology. The analysis is further anchored in four theoretical frameworks: polycentric governance, rent-seeking political economy, digital colonialism, and institutional dualism, to explain why AI governance in low-capacity states is structurally prone to capture. The study demonstrates that AI governance outcomes depend less on the formal elegance of national strategy documents than on the interaction between state capacity, procurement incentives, data governance, and informal institutions. Where these conditions are unfavorable, AI governance produces an illusion of efficiency: measurable process improvements coexisting with deepening exclusion, opacity, and the redistribution of informational and contractual power toward political elites, donor intermediaries, and international vendors. The paper’s principal conceptual contribution is the AI Governance Outcome Matrix, a two-dimensional diagnostic framework mapping likely governance trajectory across four quadrants defined by state capacity and institutional alignment. The matrix identifies simultaneous reform along both dimensions as the necessary condition for durable movement toward publicvalue-creating governance. Ubuntu philosophy is engaged as a substantive governance epistemology rather than as rhetorical decoration, providing a normative counterframework to Western-centric AI ethics models by reconceptualizing data as communal stewardship, algorithmic accountability as collective obligation, and public benefit as relational flourishing. The article concludes with ten actionable recommendations spanning open procurement, infrastructure sequencing, distributed oversight, participatory design, and iterative policy learning, directed at policymakers, development finance institutions, and governance practitioners operating within the 2025-2030 African Union Continental AI Strategy implementation window.
Geopolitical Escalation as a Systemic Business Shock: Energy Markets, Supply-Chain Fragility, and Migration Spillovers in the Global Economy
Authors
Alieu Stephen KafoeDBA Candidate, Doctor of Business Administration Program, Marymount University, USA
Bernadette Mualumatweh FohEdD Student, Department of Education, Marymount University, USA
Abstract
Escalating military confrontation in the Gulf and adjacent maritime corridors has re-emerged as a defining source of systemic risk to the global economy. While geopolitical analyses typically emphasize security and diplomacy, scholarly attention has been less directed to how regional conflict propagates through global business systems. This commentary examines how Gulf escalation transmits macroeconomic instability and population movements through three interdependent channels: global energy markets, international supply-chain networks, and migration systems. Drawing on recent peer-reviewed research (2021-2026), multilateral institutional analyses, and contemporaneous conflict documentation, the paper synthesizes insights from international business, supply-chain operations, and political economy. The 2023-2025 Red Sea crisis serves as the primary empirical foundation, documenting approximately a 70% reduction in Bab-el-Mandeb transit volumes, freight rate increases of up to 400% on key corridors, projected global inflation increments of up to 0.23 percentage points for 2025, a 90% decrease in Red Sea container shipping between December 2023 and February 2024, and a deepening humanitarian crisis affecting Yemen’s 4.8 million internally displaced persons. These documented patterns demonstrate how localized asymmetric conflict generates system-wide economic disruption. The kinetic escalation on February 28, 2026, involving Iran, the United States, and Israel provides real-time validation of the framework’s predictive claims, thereby simultaneously activating the energy, supply-chain, and migration channels theorized herein. The commentary advances four testable theoretical propositions and a research agenda that connect geopolitical risk to energy price formation, supply-chain network fragility, migration-linked labor market outcomes, and the nonlinear, interactive effects across all three channels. It advances international business scholarship by conceptualizing geopolitical escalation as a multichannel, systemic-level shock transmitted through interdependent markets, and by integrating migration and labor mobility as central business-relevant outcomes. Actionable implications are developed for multinational enterprises, international financial institutions, and policymakers seeking to construct a risk-smart global trade architecture.
Security Risks of Gulf Conflicts: How Energy Markets and Migration Generate Systemic Economic Instability
Authors
Alieu Stephen KAFOE (corresponding author, stephenkafoe@yahoo.com), DBA Candidate, Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) Program, School of Business and Technology, Marymount University, Arlington, Virginia, United States of America
Bernadette Mualumatweh FOH, EdD Student, Department of Education, Marymount University, Arlington, Virginia, United States of America
Abstract
Security in global socio-economic systems increasingly depends on understanding how localized geopolitical conflicts evolve into systemic risks through interconnected energy markets, supply-chain networks, and migration systems. This review addresses a specific gap in the literature concerning insufficient conceptualization of Gulf conflict escalation (2023-2026) as a multidimensional business shock capable of generating macroeconomic instability and reshaping the operating conditions of multinational enterprises through interacting transmission channels. The study aims not merely to synthesize previous research but also to classify the mechanisms by which Gulf crises propagate, identify persistent patterns and thematic imbalances in existing scholarship, and formulate new theoretical insights that explain the systemic nature of geopolitical shocks. The review analyzes recent English-language academic publications, institutional reports, and crisis related analytical evidence published predominantly during 2023-2026. Sources were selected for their relevance to Gulf conflicts, energy volatility, supply-chain disruption, migration spillovers, and risks for multinational firms; they were subsequently grouped into thematic clusters and examined through narrative synthesis and cross-channel comparative mapping. Three stable regularities emerge. First, geopolitical escalation generates cumulative rather than isolated effects, in which oil price expectations, logistics costs, insurance premiums, inflationary pressures, and labor mobility mutually reinforce one another. Second, existing literature prioritizes short-term market reactions while underestimating delayed consequences for institutional resilience, labor systems, and long-term corporate adaptation. Third, regional conflicts become global security challenges when they disrupt strategic energy corridors or transport routes, as network dependence amplifies the scale of resulting vulnerabilities. The scientific contribution of the article lies in proposing an integrated, multichannel conceptual framework that interprets Gulf escalation as a systemic business shock transmitted simultaneously through energy systems, logistics networks, migration flows, and investment behavior. Based on the review findings, the study formulates four distinct theoretical propositions that explain interactions among geopolitical instability, economic transmission channels, and changing conditions for multinational enterprise operations. These propositions extend previous approaches by conceptualizing energy, migration, and supply-chain effects as interdependent mechanisms that produce nonlinear security consequences that exceed the isolated impact of individual factors. Furthermore, the article develops a structured research agenda to support future empirical testing of the proposed theoretical relationships and to advance predictive modeling of geopolitical shock propagation amid prolonged Gulf instability.
Certifications
