The nexus between economic growth, energy use, international trade and ecological footprints: the role of environmental regulations in N11 countries

Diversified human activities and inappropriate economic growth strategies have induced a trade-off between economic growth and environmental degradation worldwide. Consequently, the aggravating environmental concerns have warranted regulations to be enforced for safeguarding the welfare of the global environment. However, the effectiveness of such environmental regulations in reducing environmental deterioration has received equivocal empirical evidence in the literature. Against this backdrop, this study investigates the influence of environmental regulations on the ecological footprints in the context of the Next Eleven countries between 1990 and 2016. The results from the econometric analysis, controlling for cross-sectional dependency issues in the data, reveal that the existing environmental regulations legislated in the Next Eleven countries are ineffective in reducing the ecological footprints of these nations. Besides, greater energy consumption and openness to international trade are found to boost ecological footprints. Moreover, the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis is also authenticated for the panel of the Next Eleven nations. The country-specific findings indicate that energy consumption anonymously degraded the environment in all the eleven nations, while heterogeneous impacts of environmental regulations, economic growth and international trade on the environment are ascertained. Hence, these findings, in a nutshell, recommend the Next Elevennations to strengthen and enforce the environmental regulations, adopt sustainable economic growth policies, reduce fossil fuel dependency and participate in sustainable trade to ensure environmental sustainability

Export barriers and path to internationalization: A comparison of conventional enterprises and international new ventures

Twenty years after the seminal work on rapid and early internationalization, export barrier research remains detached from this path of internationalization. Thus far, export research has largely disregarded the relationship between path to internationalization and the influence of export constraints. This paper opens a new thoroughfare of inquiry by distinguishing international new ventures from conventional enterprises on the basis of the export barrier construct. Using a sample of 129 small multinational enterprises, our logistic regression model separates international new ventures from conventional enterprises, with accuracy approaching 80 % on the basis of eight underlying export barrier factors. Our results convey two dynamic implications: In the realm of export research, we demonstrate that export barriers can indeed predict the path to internationalization. Thus, gradual internationalization is induced by skill and knowledge shortages, while rapid internationalization ensues from positive managerial orientation and lack of confidence in the host market. From a policymaking perspective, this study provides a basis for predicting the international new venture-to-conventional enterprise ratio within the population as well as an instructive basis for needs-based targeting of incentives