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Scholars have given enormous attention to the roles of energy use and trade in economic growth strategies; however, recent international trade literature suggests that not merely the volume of trade but the diversification of goods may have a potential effect on economic growth. Thus, this paper uses the diversification of export goods and diversification of import goods as explanatory variables along with energy consumption and assessed the role of these important variables in economic development. The empirical results from Westerlund's (J Appl Econom 23:193–233, 2008) and Westerlund's (Oxf Bull Econ Stat 69:709–748, 2007) tests disclosed the existence of cointegration. The long-run estimations obtained from the CUP-FM technique revealed that both import and export product diversifications positively influence economic growth. This presents a vital opportunity for emerging nations to expand growth by diversifying export and import products. Likewise, energy use, labor, and capital contribute to increasing economic growth. The estimates from the causality test illustrated bidirectional causality between export diversification and economic growth and unidirectional causality from energy to export diversification. Finally, policy suggestions to expand economic progress are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research and Development (R&D) is the common denominator of innovation and technological progress, supporting sustainable development and economic growth. In light of the availability of new datasets and innovative indicators, in this work, we introduce a novel perspective to analyse the international trade of goods through the lenses of the nexus R&D-industrial activities of countries. We propose two new indices, RDE and RDI, summarizing the R&D content of countries' export and import baskets—respectively—and investigate their evolution in time, during the period 1995–2017, and space. We demonstrate the potential of these indices to shed new light on the evolution of R&D choices and trade, innovation, and development. In fact, compared to standard measures of countries' development and economic growth (e.g., the Human Development Index among the others tested), these indices provide complementary information. In particular, tracing the trajectories of countries along the RDE-HDI plane, different dynamics appear for countries with increased HDI, which we speculate can be reasoned with countries' availability of natural resources. Eventually, we identify two insightful applications of the indices to investigate further countries' environmental performances as related to their role in international trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]