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Global climate change results from increasing national efforts of all countries to achieve higher economic growth. These efforts contribute to extravagant phenomena such as sea-level rise, global warming, and decreasing precipitation. The importance of climate change is measured by its impact on economic activities. Some regions, including the Middle East and Northern Africa (MENA), are exposed to more severe climate change. Therefore, the effects of climate change on the economic growth of the MENA region countries are investigated in this study. Thus temperature and precipitation data plus economic growth of 14 MENA countries during 2000–2016 were used here. The Pedroni, Kao, and Westerlund cointegration tests confirmed existence of a long-run equilibrium relationship. This study employed panel data cointegration fully modified ordinary least squares and dynamic ordinary least squares models. The results indicate existence of a cointegrated long-term relationship between climate change and economic growth. The economic growth elasticity to climate change, gross fixed capital formation, population growth, and inflation are consistent with theoretical and empirical research types. Moreover, comparing the elasticity in both applied approaches shows that climate change variables have significant negative effects with the same results for both models. It implies that over the long term one percent increase in temperature and precipitation is associated with a 0.25 and 0.024 percentage decrease in economic growth (under the FMOLS model), respectively. Moreover, a one percent increase in temperature and precipitation over the long term is associated with a 0.28 and 0.005 percent decrease in economic growth (under the DOLS model), respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Income inequality is an important issue in achieving sustainable growth in developing economies. However, there is a dearth of studies that examine the distributional effects of structural changes accompanying economic development policies in developing economies, especially Egypt. This study examines how income inequality has been affected by economic growth and the structural changes that have occurred in Egypt during the previous four decades. Unlike many empirical studies, the study applies an asymmetric methodology to capture the potential nonlinear effects of growth and structural changes on different locations of income inequality using the Quantile Autoregressive Distributed Lags model (QARDL). Results confirm an asymmetric cointegration relationship among variables and the speed of adjustment to catch up with the long-run equilibrium path differs significantly across different quantiles which confirms the asymmetric behavior. While the disequilibrium is corrected in the short run at a speed of 65 to 64% for the lower quantiles, the speed slows down to reach 55 to 58% at the upper locations of the Gini coefficient. Economic growth has a heterogeneous effect across different quantiles of inequality; moreover, the inverted U-shaped relationship is confirmed only across the lower half of quantiles. This implies that the Kuznets hypothesis is valid only when inequality becomes lower than its current levels in Egypt. Results also confirm the high improving distributional effect of urbanization in Egypt across all quantiles. Thus, it is useful for economic policymakers to implement policies that accelerate the urbanization process to reduce income inequality in Egypt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on effects of ecological restoration and afforestation and their links to land conservation and regional development have received global attention. The Chinese government has successively invested a substantial amount of funds in the Grain for Green Program (GGP) since the mid-1990s. The economic effects of the GGP on macroeconomic growth could be attributed to an increase in agricultural production and off-farm employment and follow-up industry development. Few studies have focused on economic effects of the GGP at the national level using long-term series of panel data in 31 provinces and cities across the country. This study analyzed the regional differentiation and temporal-spatial changes in the GGP and investigated economic impacts of the GGP at different scales. Results showed that the scale of the GGP varied significantly in the eastern, central and western regions and regional changes were characterized by temporal differentiation from 2000 to 2016. The GGP had a slightly negative impact on China's economic growth, which presented an overall U-shape, changed with an increase in economic growth. Significant regional heterogeneities in economic growth and impacts of the GGP were observed in the eastern, central and western regions. In the current situation in China, the technical progress, adjustment of industrial structure and focus on human capital to promote the development of follow-up industries and farmers' labor skills have demonstrated the role for improving economic growth and optimizing the GGP arrangement. It is crucial to achieve a synergy between ecosystem conservation and regional economic in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a comprehensive review of mountains as a highly heterogeneous, dynamic, yet increasingly vulnerable terrestrial environment undergoing rapid change in the Anthropocene. Mountains are widely appreciated for their geodiversity, species richness, high endemism, and association with various essential ecosystem services and cultural sustenance. However, in many of the planet's most imposing mountain systems, the high alpine zone was scarcely visited before the twentieth century, and those places have been rapidly transformed from obscurity into theaters of intense anthropogenic change due to economic development and expansion of human activities. It is also widely noted that mountains are at the forefront of global environmental change and will be affected disproportionately by climate change. Synthesizing from key works on mountain relief formation, geodiversity, geo-biological connectivity, and ongoing change in mountain environments, this article makes the timely and important contribution to the field by positing mountains as vulnerable places in the Anthropocene. It is argued that owing to the highly heterogeneous nature of the constituent parts of their biophysical environment, mountain systems should be analyzed through a combination of disciplines, and should be assessed from the perspective of 'place' in order to gain crucial insight into their unique properties and change pathways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to empirically examine the effects of demographic change on economic growth in Middle East countries. As a further step, the working-age population is disaggregated by age and gender to investigate their effects on economic growth. The study employs static linear panel data models for ten Middle East countries for the 5-year period from 1996 to 2016. The findings indicate that young workers, middle-aged workers, senior workers, population growth rate, and old dependency ratio positively affect economic growth, while the youth dependency ratio negatively affects economic growth. Analysis by gender reveals that the male working-age population contributes more to economic growth than the female working-age population. These findings confirm that governments should formulate policies that will encourage women to engage actively in the labor market to enhance their productivity and enable them to contribute to achieving a high-income economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing evidence shows that global warming has exerted important influence on the economies of societies in the past and will continue to have effects in the future. The provinces of China differ substantially in terms of their temperatures and their degrees of economic development. Therefore, discussion of the positive and negative effects of global warming on economic development at the provincial level is beneficial for determining the effects of global warming on economic development in different provinces, and this discussion also helps to answer the question of how to increase the resilience of economies to global warming. This paper studies the effects of annual average temperature changes on economic growth in the 31 provinces of China from 1978 to 2013 (here referred to as the historical period) and in the 5 typical provinces from 2010 to 2100 (here referred to as the future) under the RCP8.5 scenario. The results indicate that (a) from 1978 to 2013, economic growth exhibits a quadratic nonlinear response to local temperature in all provinces of China and that temperature has both positive and negative effects on the economic growth rates of different provinces. In addition, taking 23.37 °C as a threshold value, over 96% of the provinces display positive effects. (b) Under the RCP8.5 scenario, from 2010 to 2100, although the 5 typical provinces maintain trends reflecting economic growth, the average rate of growth is 80% lower than the value during the historical period. The purpose of this study is to draw the attention of the government to the implications of future global warming for the economic development of different provinces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]