Green Technology Innovation and Firm-Level Technical Efficiency in the Philippines
Feb 1, 2025
Ibrahim Niankara is a Professor of Applied Economics and Digital Innovation at the College of Business, Al Ain University (Abu Dhabi Campus), UAE. He is the founder and director of the BRASS Digital Lab — a pioneering Regulatory Technology (RegTech) and Supervisory Technology (SupTech) firm with platform coverage of all 76+ UAE accredited higher education institutions, serving both the institutions that must comply (Edu-RegTech) and the government bodies that supervise them (Edu-SupTech).
His academic research is organized around two pioneering theoretical frameworks. Inference Economics treats the AI inference token — the atomic commodity that gives access to machine cognition — as a formal economic good with supply, demand, price, welfare implications, and distributional consequences. Its core constructs (the Token Production Function, the Token Kuznets Curve, and the Jevons Paradox of AI Tokens) are developed in a series of working papers at BRASS Digital Lab. Agentic Innovation Economics extends classical endogenous growth theory to accommodate autonomous AI agents as independent innovators — studied through formal theoretical models and Monte Carlo simulations.
Complementing this frontier agenda, his broader empirical program spans Applied Econometrics, Digital Finance and Financial Inclusion, Open Innovation, Strategic Orientation Economics, and Development Economics — with a geographic focus on Sub-Saharan Africa (Burkina Faso, WAEMU), the Gulf Cooperation Council, Europe and Central Asia, the Philippines, and the United States. His methods draw on Random Utility Theory, Bayesian approaches, spatial copula regression, Data Envelopment Analysis, Statistical Process Control, and machine-learning prescriptive analytics.
He has published in internationally recognized peer-reviewed journals including the Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity; the Global Business and Economics Review; Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies; the International Journal of Finance & Economics; the African Journal of Science, Technology, Innovation and Development; Scientific African; and Global Ecology and Conservation.
Prof. Niankara received his Ph.D. in Economics from Oklahoma State University (2011), where he also earned an M.S. in Economics with a Graduate Minor in Statistics (2009) and a B.S. in Economics — Quantitative Studies option, Magna Cum Laude (2007). He previously held positions at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria, the University of Houston Downtown, and Université Aube Nouvelle (Burkina Faso).
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