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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]

International trade is key to boosting the economic growth and development of an economy. Hence, it becomes critical to analyze its determinants. The present study attempts to empirically analyze the determinants of trade exports of Pakistan with its top-5 trade partners. The prior literature suffers from biased findings due to deploying the aggregate data and ignoring the likely asymmetries in the drivers of the exports. The present study has used the monthly data of oil prices and macroeconomic uncertainty in order to empirically investigate the determinants of exports. For the purpose of analysis, several advanced econometric (quantile unit root, cointegration, and granger causality) tests and (quantile-on-quantile regression) techniques are utilized to handle the issue of asymmetries in the modeled series. The findings reveal a positive and significant relationship between oil prices in Pakistan and exports. Furthermore, macroeconomic uncertainty has a significantly negative impact on the country's exports. Based on the results, key policy implications are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We offer a new approach that explains long-run export growth, and how export growth varies by economic development. The approach relies on a heterogeneous-firm model that parses drivers of export growth along the following dimensions: comparative advantage changes, product demand growth, country-level growth, global growth, and growth in destinations reached. We show that aggregate trade growth for a product is a stronger driver of exports in the same product heading for high-income countries, but is less so for middle-income and low-income countries. Country-level export drivers explain more of export growth at the product-level in middle-income countries, compared to other country-groups. High-income countries appear to benefit more from secular trade growth trends, though the latter results are not as statistically robust. Finally, having more destinations is the most notable driver of the observed export growth in our analysis. Low-income countries appear to benefit the most from entering new markets. The main findings hold up to several robustness checks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]