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This research examines the causal impact of institutional quality on economic development from a novel perspective. At the country level, we exploit variation in the natural malaria prevalence in 1900, just before vector-control methods were developed, to instrument for institutional quality using a two-stage least squares instrumental variables framework. Our instrument is a population-weighted average of malaria endemicity estimates for the year 1900 developed by the World Health Organization scientists in the 1960s. We argue that this measure of historical malaria offers more expansive geographic information about the disease environment, and our baseline IV estimates reveal that greater institutional quality causes greater contemporaneous economic growth. Next, we investigate the robustness of these baseline results to alternative explanations, including the role of geography and the role of early colonizers' experiences, as the causal link between the early disease environmental, institutional quality, and contemporary growth. As an additional test of the explanatory power of malaria endemicity in 1900 as an instrumental variable, we replace our instrument for settler mortality and replicate the core results from the seminal study on colonial origins of comparative development by Acemoglu et al. (2001). In summary, we propose that malaria endemicity estimated for 1900 holistically explains the legacy of early disease on institutional quality development and contemporary economic development, thus significantly contributing to the resolution of the geography versus institutions debate. [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]

Ecological degradation is a major challenge for all nations. The problem is particularly worrying for South Africa, which has recently suffered from various ecological catastrophes. Thus, the empirical study evaluates the nexus between CO2 emissions and financial development, renewable energy, economic growth and environmental-related technologies in South Africa utilizing data between 1980 and 2020. We employed autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and time-varying causality to evaluate these connections. The results from the ARDL show that financial development and environmental-related technologies lessen CO2 emissions while economic progress intensifies CO2 emissions. Surprisingly, renewable energy does not mitigate CO2 emissions. Furthermore, the time-varying causality shows that all the independent variables can forecast CO2 emissions at different sub-periods. Finally, our results are resilient to various policy ramifications useful in reducing CO2 emissions and associated adverse ecological consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]