The marginal effects of economic growth, financial development, and low-carbon energy use on carbon footprints in Oman: fresh evidence from autoregressive distributed lag model analysis

Can minimizing risk exposures help in inhibiting carbon footprints? The environmental repercussions of international trade and clean energy

Since bettering environmental conditions has acquired significant interest globally, discovering factors that may facilitate the establishment of environmental sustainability is currently of foremost importance. Hence, this study considers a sample of 33 members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and checks whether reducing exposure to different forms of country risks, in the presence of international trade and clean energy consumption, can reduce their respective carbon footprint levels. Utilizing annual data from 2000 to 2018 and employing methods that handle problems related to dependence across cross-sectional units and heterogeneity of slope coefficients, the findings endorse that (a) reducing financial and political risks abate carbon footprints, (b) economic risk exposure does not influence carbon footprints, (c) international trade exerts carbon footprint-boosting effects, and (d) undergoing unclean to clean energy transition curbs carbon footprints. Accordingly, the concerned governments should these findings into account while conceptualizing green environmental policies in the future.

Financial development and environmental quality in developed countries: a systematic literature review

Studying the effect of financial development on environmental quality has become imperative in the modern world due to the climate change challenges. Hence, this systematic literature review provides a comprehensive overview of the existing body of knowledge on the nexus of financial development and environmental quality in developed countries. Three databases: Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar were used to search the relevant articles in this domain. Finally, 20 journal articles qualified for the systematic literature review based on the pre-defined article inclusion criteria as per the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) framework. We found that a range of econometric approaches were used in all examined papers, employing a diverse range of proxy variables to model the relationship between financial development and environmental quality. Overall, the findings of the examined papers imply mixed evidence of this nexus in developed countries. We highlight the knowledge gap in this research domain examining the financial development and environmental quality link from different proxies.

Environment-growth nexus and corruption in the MENA region: Novel evidence based on method of moments quantile estimations

This study contributes to the environment-growth nexus literature by examining corruption's effect on environmental quality in 17 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries between 1984 and 2018. We use four different indicators of environmental degradation (ecological footprint, carbon dioxide emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, and carbon emission intensity) to gain a comprehensive view of the relationship. This study's methodological value added is the application of the method of moments quantile regression, which enables us to account for different relationships between the independent variables and environmental quality at different levels of environmental degradation. The results indicate that corruption worsens environmental quality based on three of the four indicators of environmental degradation, while the impact appears to become less severe at higher levels of environmental deterioration. The results also indicate that traditional mean-based panel data estimation methods provide an incomplete picture of the factors behind environmental problems: The explanatory variables' impacts tend to vary at different levels of environmental quality, and the impact's sign can even change when moving from the lowest to the highest environmental degradation quantiles. Overall, the results highlight the importance of curbing corruption to enable enforcement of more stringent environmental regulations.

The spatial impact of digital economy on energy intensity in China in the context of double carbon to achieve the sustainable development goals

Using the provincial panel data of China during 2012-2019, the present study employed spatial Durbin error model to explore the spatial effect of the digital economy on energy intensity. The results show that both digital economy and energy intensity have spatial autocorrelation, showing the distribution characteristics of spatial aggregation. The digital economy has a significant negative influence on energy intensity. The result shows a significant spatial spillover effect of digital economy on energy intensity, and the development of the digital economy in neighboring regions reduces energy intensity in the central region. Additionally, industrial structure, urbanization, energy price, and foreign direct investment have a heterogenous impact on energy intensity. Thus, it is crucial to give importance to the development of the energy intensity, plan the spatial layout of the digital industry as a whole, drive the coordinated growth of the regional digital economy, quicken the upgrading of industrial structure, promote urbanization, perfect the energy price formation mechanism, raise the entry threshold for foreign direct investment, to effectively reduce the energy intensity, and facilitate the smooth realization of the "double carbon" goal.