Natural resources rents and economic performance: Post-COVID-19 era for G7 countries

Spatio-temporal heterogeneity and coupling effect of mining economy, social governance and environmental conservation: Evidence from Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, China

In order to solve the problem of coordinated development among mining economy, social governance and environmental conservation in global resource-based cities, we choose Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region as the research area. The advantage of resource endowment and resource industry was measured by location quotient and input-output method. The panel data related to mining governance from 2010 to 2021 were selected to build the evaluation and coupling analysis model between mining economic, social governance and environmental conservation, and the spatial-temporal heterogeneity and coupling effect of them were analyzed by comprehensive empowerment evaluation, spatial autocorrelation analysis and barrier degree methods. The results show that: (1) Except for the overall upward trend of social governance, the development level of mining economy and environmental conservation are basically stable; (2) The resource-rich areas have obvious mining economic advantages, and the central cities have good social governance capabilities, and the environmental conservation effectiveness is uncertain; (3) The coupling effect between mining economy and social governance is stronger than that between mining economy and environment conservation, and the synergistic coupling effect of the three is relatively random. Finally, we put forward some policy response strategies to Guangxi, and theoretical and practical reference would be provided for resource-based cities around the world.

Financial development, resource richness, eco-innovation, and sustainable development: Does geopolitical risk matter?

Financial development and geopolitical risks can significantly affect sustainable development. However, the roles of these factors in sustainable development are rarely investigated. Thus, this study takes into account the role of geopolitical risk while exploring the effects of financial development, natural resource rents, and eco-innovation on sustainable development in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. To this end, yearly data from 1990 to 2019 is analyzed using advanced econometric tests. The Common Correlated Effects Mean Group (CCEMG) results indicate that financial development and eco-innovation are significantly and positively related to sustainable development. Natural resource rents have a detrimental impact on sustainable development which confirms the presence of the resource curse hypothesis in OECD countries. Furthermore, the results revealed that controlling geopolitical risk is useful in fostering sustainable development. Lastly, the panel Granger causality test unveiled one-way causality from financial development, eco-innovation, natural resource rents, and geopolitical risk to sustainable development. Moreover, causalities are found from geopolitical risk to financial development, eco-innovation and natural resources. These findings suggest that OECD countries should prioritize financial development and eco-innovation policies for sustainable development while mitigating the negative effects of natural resource rents. The geopolitical risk can harm sustainable development, so policymakers should promote international cooperation and risk-sharing.

Maximizing natural resource rent economics: The role of human capital development, financial sector development, and open-trade economies in driving technological innovation

Technological innovation is considered one of the most significant production variables. The influence of natural resource rents on this factor is crucial to the success of nations' sustainability with abundant natural resources. Driven by a theoretical argument, this research investigates the impact of natural resource rents on technological innovation by engaging the "instrumental variable fixed-effect method." With "Driscoll-Kraay's robust standard errors," the research accounts for "cross-sectional dependency" in a panel of 79 economies from 1995 to 2021. The empirical results confirm that natural resource rents positively and significantly impact innovation measured with trademark and patent applications. The findings also indicate that the components of natural resource rents, such as oil and natural gas rents, significantly promote technological innovation. The findings also indicate the roles of human development, financial development, and trade economies in the impact of natural resource rents on technological innovation. Due to heterogeneity, the analysis categorizes countries based on their economic development into "developed," "transition," and "developing" economies. The article finishes with policy implications, arguing that natural resource rent support a more resource-efficient economy and move toward a more circular economy targeted for sustainability. Therefore, emerging markets that initiate natural resource rents can support human capital and financial services through financial sector development and trade in maximizing technological innovation.

Identifying price bubbles in copper market: Evidence from a GSADF test approach

This paper uses the test proposed by Generalized Supremum Augmented Dickey-Fuller to identify whether there are multiple bubbles in copper price. The empirical results show that base on market fundamentals, there are seven bubbles existed from January 1980 to March 2023. Through analyses, the first two bubbles can be explained by the demand from Japan by the industry concentration and persistent supply constraint. The third to sixth bubbles are mainly negatively impacted by the global financial crisis and growing demand of China. The last bubble is caused by the economic recovery from Covid-19. The logit regression has stated that aluminum price, copper production, all metals index and GDP have a positive impact on copper bubbles, while China's copper imports and precious metals price negatively explains copper bubbles. The main contributions are the investigation of the copper price bubbles, its determinants and the different technique of GSADF to detect copper price bubbles. Furthermore, it provides helpful information for those investors to make reasonable investment decisions and thus, avoid potential price risk.

Spatial effects of trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and natural resource rents on carbon productivity in the GCC region

Background

Natural resource rents (NRRs) may determine the environment and economic growth of the GCC countries due to their over-reliance on the natural resource sector. NRRs are the source of income in resource-abundant GCC countries. So, increasing income of these countries could pollute the environment by increasing overall economic activities. Consequently, NRRs could determine carbon productivity in the GCC region through increasing income and carbon emissions.

Methods

The effects of trade openness (TO), foreign direct investment (FDI), urbanization, and oil and natural gas rents on carbon productivity (CP) are examined in the GCC region from 1980-2021 using the spatial Durbin model.

Results

The CP of the GCC countries has spillovers in their neighboring countries. Oil rent reduces carbon productivity in domestic economies and the entire GCC region. Natural gas rent, TO, and FDI increase, and urbanization reduces carbon productivity in neighboring economies and the entire GCC region. Moreover, urbanization reduces carbon productivity in domestic economies as well. The study recommends the GCC countries to reduce reliance on oil rent and increase globalization in terms of TO and FDI in the region to promote carbon productivity. Moreover, GCC countries should also focus more on natural gas rent instead of oil rent to raise carbon productivity.

Does financial globalization promote renewable energy investment? Empirical insights from China

The increasing integration of financial markets worldwide has brought about significant changes in the investment landscape for renewable energy. However, the connection between financial globalization and renewable energy investment has gotten relatively little consideration. As a result, the analysis's main goal is to determine the asymmetric nexus between financial globalization and renewable energy investment in China, covering the period from 1995 to 2021. The influence of financial globalization on investments in renewable energy has been calculated using the linear and non-linear ARDL frameworks. Both methods analyze the short-run and long-run relationships between financial globalization and renewable energy investment. The linear model highlights the favorable influence of financial globalization on renewable energy investment in the short and long run. On the other side, the non-linear model implies that a rise in financial globalization increases investment in renewable energy in the short and long run, and the fall in financial globalization cause the renewable energy investment to fall only in the long run. In addition, national income help promote renewable energy investment in both the short and long run in linear and non-linear models. Therefore, encouraging international cooperation to develop renewable energy projects through public-private partnerships can increase investment flows and provide greater access to financing.

Do green financial and non-financial policies achieve the carbon neutrality target?

Due to the pressing need to combat climate change, reaching carbon neutrality-defined as having net-zero greenhouse gas emissions-has elevated to the status of a worldwide priority. While non-financial policies concentrate on regulation and incentives to promote environmentally friendly behavior, green financial policies strive to move investment toward low-carbon and sustainable initiatives. Therefore, the study aims to examine how green financial and non-financial policies affect carbon neutrality in China from 1995 to 2021. For analyzing the linear and nonlinear estimates, the study has employed the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) frameworks. The findings suggest that in the linear framework, green finance policies and environmental policy stringency encourage renewable energy consumption and discourage CO2 emissions. In the nonlinear framework, the positive shocks in the green finance policies and environmental policy stringency increase renewable energy consumption, and the negative shock in both types of policies discourages renewable energy consumption. In the CO2 model, a positive shock in green finance policies and environmental policy stringency reduces CO2 emissions, and a negative change in both these policies is insignificant. Since the positive and negative changes in both these policies significantly and differently impact renewable energy consumption and CO2 emissions; thus, policymakers should take into account positive and negative changes in both these policies while formulating policies for carbon neutrality targets in China.

Natural resources for policy makers: Revisiting COVID-19 perspective of aggregate South Asian economies

The global pandemic of covid-19 affected human lives and the global environment. Further, literature on the nexus of natural resources and economic growth, initiating the pandemic in the 21st century has confronted policymakers with uncertainty. This requires revisiting the link between natural resources and the economic performance of the South Asian economies. For this purpose, the present study has tried to investigate the role of natural resources in the economic growth of the aggregate South Asian economies during the Covid-19 challenge. The analysis has been completed by a novel approach of MMQR taking data from 1980 to 2021. The oil rents have negatively affected the economic growth may be due to its lower demand during the pandemic caused by lockdown activity. The trade and electricity produced from renewable improve the economic performance of the designated sample economies. The results provide evidence of the irreversible investment theory. The analysis implies that efficient policies for natural resources, specifically oil prices, are required to encourage the South Asian economies' role. Further, the positivity of electricity production from renewable gives rise to the growth hypothesis, which depicts that using renewable energy enhances the economic growth of South Asian economies.

Natural resources volatility and causal associations for BRICS countries: Evidence from Covid-19 data

Natural resource price volatility has been a major concern in recent time, especially during the COVID 19 period. Although several empirical research have looked into the oil and natural resources prices nexus with economic growth, but, our study makes a significant contribution to the present literature by estimating the long run natural resource price volatility influence on economic growth as well as the causal associations between volatility of the prices of natural resources and economic growth for BRICS economies over 1995-2020 period. To conduct empirical estimation, the study has used new and advanced (CUP-FM) continuously updated fully modified and continuously updated bias-corrected (CUP-BC) estimators for long term influences of the natural resources prices and (Dumitrescu and Hurlin, 2012) heterogeneous test for panel causality for the estimation of the causal relationship between the variables. The results provide clear evidences about the negative influence of volatility in natural resources prices, whereas positive impact of gas and oil rents on economic growth or economic performance of the BRICS economies. Moreover, bidirectional causal association is also revealed from our empirical findings to exist between economic growth and price volatility of natural resources. The findings of our study are robust to various policy implementations. It is recommended to reduce the reliance of natural resources as well as the adoption of short run and long run natural resource hedging policies to mitigate the detrimental impacts of price volatility of natural resources on economic growth and environment.

Exploring the association between resource dependence and haze pollution in China: the mediating effect of green technology innovation

Haze pollution has been addressed in extensive studies over the last few years. However, the relationship between resource dependence and haze pollution has not been fully investigated. This study focuses on addressing this problem while considering the mediating role of green technology innovation. A panel dataset of 263 prefecture-level cities in China from 2005 to 2018 is used for the analysis. The results show the following: (1) the two-way fixed-effect model reveals that resource dependence contributes significantly to haze pollution, and this finding remains robust across a series of robustness tests. (2) A mediation analysis indicates that resource dependence is unfavorable for green technology innovation, indirectly affecting the alleviation of haze pollution. (3) The results of panel threshold regression suggest that green technology innovation promotes haze reduction in the weak and medium resource dependence stages, whereas this optimization effect disappears in the strong resource dependence stage due to rebound effects. (4) The results of regional heterogeneity demonstrate that the positive effects of resource dependence on haze pollution exist in eastern and western China but not in central China. Based on these results, policy implications are given to reduce haze pollution.

A multiscale integrated analysis of the COVID-19 restrictions: The energy metabolism of UK and the related socio-economic changes

The COVID-19 pandemic and the related lockdown restrictions have imposed a wide range of impacts that need to be analysed based on the specific characteristics of countries. By comparing socio-economic and energy data for the four quarters of 2020 to the same period of 2019, the MuSIASEM approach is used, for the first time, to investigate the energy metabolism of UK during a period of economic downturn. Results show that the commercial and the public administration activities have been able to achieve energy efficiency increases, and the residential sector has accounted for energy-related economies of scale. The industrial and the other activity sectors, on the contrary, have raised the energy intensity of production. Comparted to time series data, scenarios, and modelling exercises, the MuSIASEM approach integrates a wide range of intensive and extensive variables across different scales of analysis and investigate how specific socio-economic and energy structures have reacted to the COVID-19 crisis. The methodology can be easily replicated for other case studies and results can support the design of recovery and sustainable transition strategies.

Analyzing the nexus of COVID-19 and natural resources and commodities: Evidence from time-varying causality

Even though a few studies have focused on natural resources and commodity sectors by considering the pandemic, they have only compared their status in pre-COVID19 to post-COVID19. None of the studies has directly examined the causal relationship between the pandemic, and natural resource index and the primary commodity-related sector indices. This study fills the gap of exploring the dynamic association between them by analyzing the causal relationship between the COVID19, and natural resources index and the primary commodity-related sectors (i.e., agribusiness, energy, and metals & mining) by applying a novel time-varying causality test on daily data from January 23, 2020, to November 12, 2021. The empirical results support the presence of time-varying causality from COVID19 to natural resources, agribusiness, energy and metals & mining. The results obtained from the rolling window algorithm support causal linkages between the variables however at several points it fails to capture the dynamics of linkages between the variables which is captured by the recursive window algorithm. The outcome is robust when the pandemic is proxied by either number of cases or deaths. Similarly, the findings obtained from heteroskedastic-robust specification also validate our findings. Several policy implications are further discussed in the study.

FDI Inflow in BRICS and G7

A change in FDI inflow is noticed across the globe. G-7 economies, as representative of developed economies, are fronting with a sharp decline in foreign direct investment inflows in the entire world's FDI inflow, while BRICS, a representative of developing economies, is getting more of the world as a whole's FDI inflow. FDI is a significant economic development variable that has substantially impacted the economic growth of economies. Past trends of FDI inflow into BRICS and G-7 economies showed that BRICS economies had noticed a higher compounded average annual growth rate in FDI compared to G-7 economies in the preceding periods. The best-suited ARIMA model's anticipated value of FDI inflow shows an increasing trend in BRICS and a steady and dropping trend in the G-7. Comparative results of the predicted values of FDI inflow showed that BRICS would have positive FDI inflow while the G-7 would follow a declining trend. The study's findings shall help foreign investors identify the investment opportunities and their future course of action in selecting an investment destination.