Do energy-pollution-resource-transport taxes yield double dividend for Nordic economies?

With the policy performance of the Nordic countries especially from the aspects of energy security, energy equity, and environmental sustainability, this study provides more in-depth on the performance of the countries’ disaggregated environmental taxes. To examine the greenhouse gas emission and energy intensity effects of energy tax, pollution tax, resource tax, and transport tax alongside controlling for the role of employment rate and gross domestic product over the period 1995–2020, empirical tools such as the method of moments quantile regression, short- and long-run cointegration, and Granger causality approaches were utilized. Importantly, there are series of interesting results from this investigation. Firstly, the result posits the feasibility of Green growth in the panel of Nordic countries while a significant and negative nexus between GDP and energy intensity was also established. Secondly, also from the panel result, we found that only energy tax significantly mitigates both emissions and energy intensity across the quantiles while pollution tax and resource tax exacerbate emissions and energy intensity. Thus, for the panel case, only energy tax could validate the double dividend hypothesis. Thirdly, the result revealed that double dividend hypothesis and by large extent co-benefit is achievable with pollution and resource tax policies in Finland but in the short-run. Similarly, pollution, resource, and transport tax policies in Sweden are all desirable for achieving both environmental and economic benefits in the short-run. However, there is no valid evidence to support the validity of double dividend hypothesis in Denmark and Norway. Lastly, we found a one-way Granger causality from GDP, energy tax, resource tax, and transport tax to greenhouse gas emission while a one-way Granger causality also exists from GDP, energy tax, and transport tax to energy intensity. Overall, compelling policy dimensions are inferred from the investigation.© 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Examining the interaction of technology adoption-diffusion and sectoral emission intensity in developing and emerging countries

This study offers a new perspective on the drivers of environmental sustainability for sector level (manufacturing, mining, agriculture, business, trade, and transport) analysis. In this case, country-level sectoral dynamic index for technology adoption and emission intensity were constructed to study the environmental efficiency effect of technology adoption and technology diffusion across tradable and non-tradable sectors by using empirical illustration for 49 developing and emerging countries during 1990-2018 period. By correcting for potential bias arising from endogeneity and cross-border spillover effects via cross-section dependence, results reveal long-term effects of technological changes. Importantly, it is shown that the environmental efficiency effect of technology adoption holds in technology-intensive sectors (i.e manufacturing, mining, agriculture) only at lower capitalization levels, thus establishing a U-shaped nexus of technology adoption and carbon emission. Additionally, it is found that trade networks reduce emission intensities by improving technology diffusion across all the tradable sectors and in transport sector. Moreover, trade alone mitigates carbon intensity across all the sectors while income per capita spur carbon intensity in the tradable sectors. From policy insight, the study identifies the need for stricter policy directives to scale up energy and clean technologies adoption in all sector activities.publishedVersio

Examining the roles of labour standards, economic complexity, and globalization in the biocapacity deficiency of the ASEAN countries

With Singapore currently the world’s most natural capital (biocapacity) deficit alongside four other Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries having varying degree of ecological deficit, i.e. Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, it then offers a clear justification for a more scrutiny of the ASEAN states’ ecological footprint dynamics. To provide more insight on the drivers of ecological footprint in the overall panel and for each of the above-mentioned countries, the roles of economic complexity, average working hours, labour productivity, labour income share, and globalization were examined by employing the Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares Mean Group (DOLSMG) alongside the recently developed (non)time-variant Granger causality approaches. For the overall panel, the DOLSMGapproach established that labour productivity, labour income share, and globalization reduce the biocapacity deficit by improving ecological quality while economic complexity worsen the region’s environmental quality. Additionally, in the overall panel, there is Granger causality evidence from the average working hour, labour income share, labour productivity, globalization, and economic complexity to ecological footprint. Moreover, the results of the two Granger causality approaches are unanimous in evidence. For instance, average working hours per year is a significant causal of ecological footprint in all the sampled countries at varying periods. Specifically, there are Granger causalities: from labour productivity to ecological footprint in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand; from globalization to ecological footprint in Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand; from economic complexity to ecological footprint in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand, all at varying times.publishedVersio

Capital stock, energy, and innovation-related aspects as drivers of environmental quality in high-tech investing economies

By looking at the technological advancement and climate change mitigation plan of the advanced economies, the current study examines the role of sustainable development aspects such as innovations, high technology export, labor productivity, capital stock, research and development (R&D), information and communication technology (ICT), capital stock, and energy use in mitigating environmental degradation for the selected panel of countries with the most investment in technology (China, Denmark, Finland, France, Israel, Korea, Hong Kong, Germany, Japan, Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States) over the period 2000–2018. Foremost, the pooled ordinary least square (POLS) and random-effects (RE) generalized least squares (GLS) approaches provided additional interesting inferences. As such, the POLS result revealed that only capital stock in the panel countries shows a desirable environmental effect. At the same time, labor productivity, innovation, R&D, ICT, and energy further hamper ecological quality in the examined panel countries. Similarly, the GLS result largely affirms the POLS results, with only the capital stock among the explanatory variables showing evidence of emission mitigation effect in the panel. Additionally, the panel Granger causality result illustrates evidence of unidirectional causality only innovation, ICT, and capital stock to environmental degradation.publishedVersio

Towards unlocking sustainable land consumption in sub-Saharan Africa : Analysing spatio-temporal variation of built-up land footprint and its determinants

A systematic understanding of the dynamics of land consumption is extremely important for human well-being and especially vital for the ecological balance of the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) region. Remarkable land use/land cover changes due to climate change, urbanization, and food demand have affected the spatio-temporal dynamics of built-up land footprints (BLFs) in SSA. By using spatial econometric techniques, this study investigates the spatio-temporal evolution and key drivers of built-up land footprints in 28 SSA countries from 2000 to 2017. Our results show how an appropriate consideration of the role of spatial effects can shed new insights into the convergence process of built-up land footprints. Foremost, the study reveals significant evidence of both absolute and conditional convergence in BLFs over the experimental period. Additionally, the estimation indicates that biocapacity plays an important role in cutting built-up land footprints in SSA countries as there was a faster conditional convergence in countries with higher biocapacity. Moreover, the study outlined that the promotion of globalization and urbanization draws more pressure on the built-up environment and makes it challenging to reduce BLFs in SSA. In addition, this study found evidence for an inverted U-shaped nexus between per capita built-up land footprints and per capita gross domestic product (GDP), supporting the prediction of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis.© 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

The regime switching evidence of financial-economic-political risk in Turkey

In recent time, Turkey could be said to have experienced different levels of Economic Risk, Financial Risk, and Political Risk from low- to high-level. This study investigates the linkage between country risks, namely Financial Risk, Economic Risk, and Political Risk (FEP risk) in Turkey for the period 1984Q1 to 2019Q1 by using threshold cointegration, Markow-switching regression (given the nonlinearity and structural breaks observed in the time series variables), and frequency domain causality approaches. The empirical findings of this study reveal that (i) nonlinear cointegration between Economic Risk, Financial Risk, and Political Risk in Turkey is statistically significant given the evidence of threshold cointegration test, which determines the structural breaks endogenously; (ii) there is positive linkage among the component of country risk at different volatility periods; (iii) there is a significant Granger causal linkage between Economic Risk, Financial Risk and Political Risk at the different frequency levels. The study is likely to open debate about the literature since the study concludes with a discussion on short-run and long-run implications for economic, political, and financial stabilises, thus offering policy suggestions for the policymakers in Turkey.© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Examining green productivity amidst climate change technological development and spillovers in the Nordic economies

The common ground of both critics and proponents of green productivity is arguably hinged on the main role of environmental technological advancement. Considering the drive for climate-neutral economy among the Nordic states, the current study examines the role of climate change technological development within the countries and technological spillovers across countries in the pursuit for green economy. By using a combination of pooled mean group approach of autoregressive distributed lag (for coefficient estimation) and the recently developed Granger non-causality approach by Juodis et al. (2021) for the panel dataset analysis over the period 1990–2018, the results reveal that both domestic technological development and spillovers from abroad promote long-run green productivity growth in the panel and country-specific estimations. In both estimations, the impact of international diffusion of climate change technologies on green productivity is found to be larger. Additionally, the influence of these two dynamics of climate change-related technologies on attaining greening economy is the most impactful in Sweden. In the remaining Nordic economies, climate change technology spillovers in Denmark are more impactful than in Finland and least in Norway, while climate change technological development in Norway drives green productivity more than in Finland and least in Denmark. As a robust insight, the Granger causality techniques revealed causality from climate change technologies within the countries, climate change technology spillovers, and population to green productivity. Consequently, public policies should promote green innovativeness and especially learning and knowledge transfer from other countries to achieve climate neutrality targets.© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

The effects of environmental innovations and international technology spillovers on industrial and energy sector emissions – Evidence from small open economies

Environmental innovations hold promise for cutting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but most technology investments are made in large technologically leading countries. Thus, emission reductions in small open economies, such as the Nordic countries, depend on not only domestic technological development, but also technology spillovers from foreign countries. The present study analysed how the development of climate change technologies affected the Nordic countries' GHG emissions from the industrial and energy sectors during a particular time frame. Consequently, while controlling for economic growth and population, domestic and foreign technological development's effects on industrial and energy sector GHG emissions were examined from the 1990–2019 period. The results revealed that both domestically developed environmental technologies and technology spillovers from foreign economies mitigated GHG emissions from these nations' energy and industrial sectors, thereby providing an efficient pathway to achieving sectoral environmental sustainability. In particular, domestic environmental technologies were found to be more efficient in driving environmental sustainability in the industrial sector, whereas impacts from domestic and foreign technological development did not differ significantly in the energy sector. Furthermore, given that economic growth plays a vital role in GHG emissions, environmental Kuznets curve (EKC; inverted U-shaped and U-shaped) relationships have been observed in the energy and industrial sectors, respectively. This suggests that the examined countries' industrial sectors have more environmental quality hurdles to overcome.© 2023 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Are green resource productivity and environmental technologies the face of environmental sustainability in the Nordic region?

This study examines whether the raw material productivity, export intensification, and environmental-related technologies in the Nordic region (i.e., Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden) drives the region's carbon neutrality target. By adopting both symmetric and asymmetric empirical approaches over the period 1990–2019, the study found that positive and negative shifts in environmental-related technologies mitigates greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the region with the former causing a larger impact. Furthermore, the findings reveal that a positive shift in raw material productivity mitigates GHG emissions while a negative shift in raw material productivity causes a surge in GHG emissions especially in the long-run. Moreover, a positive (negative) shift in export intensity yields a decline (upsurge) in GHG emissions in the long-run. In the symmetric framework, in both long- and short-run, the result reveals that economic growth upsurges GHG emissions while raw material productivity for green growth and environmental-related technologies mitigates GHG emissions. This demonstrates the efficient raw material productivity profile of the Nordic countries. Alongside the Granger causality inference, the result further informs that energy intensity is crucial to curbing GHG emissions in the region. Thus, the result from the study offers relevant policy instructions.© 2022 The Authors.Sustainable Development published by ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

The Role of Legal System and Socioeconomic Aspects in the Environmental Quality Drive of the Global South

The increasing environmental challenges associated with the Global South is potentially associated with the socioeconomic changes amid potential institutional deficiencies such as the weak or inefficient environmental regulation. Thus, this twenty-first century challenge has increasingly necessitated more climate action from the Global South as championed by the developed economies. On this note, examines the environmental aspects of law and order (LO) vis-à-vis legal system and socioeconomic (SE) indexes of the Political Risk Services for a panel of 80 selected Global South countries over the period 1984–2014. Additionally, by employing the economic growth vis-à-vis the Gross Domestic Product per capita (GDPC) as additional explanatory variable, the study employs the more recent experimental techniques of Mean Group Estimator (MG), the Augmented Mean Group Estimator (AMG) and the Common Correlated Effects Mean Group (CCEMG). Importantly, with the more efficient CCEMG, the study found that the strength of the legal system in the Global South (although not statistically significant) is a crucial factor to mitigated carbon emission in the panel countries. However, the study found that an improved socioeconomic condition and economic expansion is detrimental to the Global South’s environmental quality. Furthermore, the Granger causality result implied that each of LO, SE and GDPC exhibits a feedback relationship with carbon emissions. Hence, the study suggests the need for a stronger implementation of environmental regulations through a revitalized legal system and some concerted socioeconomic policies that address poverty and unemployment among other factors.© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed