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This study has a twofold objective. On the one hand, the comparative analysis of the efficiency of Spanish prisons structured based on three groups of conflict and size, by non-parametric radial and non-radial DEA methods, for 2015–2020. On the other hand, to determine to what extent exogenous factors such as Covid-19, the change of government or economic growth, have influenced the levels of efficiency, controlling for the prison size within each group. The comparative analyses carried out by the Radial and non-radial DEA estimations show important differences in the results. With the non-radial method, there is a clearly decreasing trend in efficiency over time and a greater dispersion of values in the inter-annual distribution. Therefore, the efficiency values of the Penitentiary Centers according to the group to which they belong in relation to their respective efficient frontiers show greater distances or possibilities for improvement in the case of this method compared to the Radial DEA. As for the results of the second stage, the influence of Covid on the management of the centers has had a negative impact on all groups. The implications derived from mandatory confinement have been reflected in greater organizational complexities, regardless of the type of center, in terms of size and criminal complexity. In this sense, there is a positive relationship between efficiency and the size of the centers. In the case of groups 1 (larger size and conflictive) and 2 (both average size and conflictive), a curvilinear shape (U-shape) is captured where a representative part of centers is in the increasing zone of the trend. In the case of group #3, the behavior is linear. Likewise, the influence of the political party in government has been captured. In the first case, differences in efficiency are found, depending on the legislative period, although the effects of the pandemic and its temporal coincidence, and the delay between political decisions and their subsequent implementation and return of results could have had an influence. Finally, the relationship between efficiency and economic growth is positive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Consumer Expectations Survey of the ECB, I estimate how individual expectations on core economic outcomes changed in France, Germany, Italy, and Spain right after the beginning of the Ukraine–Russia war. I find that individuals expected lower economic growth and higher inflation. The effect of the war was larger in the countries with a higher energy-imports dependency. Hence, the expectation formation process might have changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we study the impact of international capital flows on the real exchange rate and sector allocation of labour and capital in open developing economies having demand side asymmetries (non-homothetic preferences) and supply side asymmetries (differences in capital intensities and productivity growth rates across sectors). We propose new channels, namely structural change and unbalanced growth, through which international capital flows can cause real exchange rate changes and sector reallocations of capital and labor in open developing economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Green growth policies aim to address both climate change and economic growth and are now prevalent throughout many economies. While green growth is sufficiently assessed in qualitative, case-study-based literature, quantitative and cross-country analyses are still limited. In response to this research deficit, our aim is twofold: (1) to develop a classification framework to quantitatively analyse green growth and (2) to identify key policy inputs and techno-economic or environmental outputs for green growth through a novel taxonomy. We focus on the G7 countries, since they have, historically, tended to align their economic policies. We employ a machine-automated K-means clustering algorithm, as well as correlation analyses, to assess where green growth "win–wins," or co-benefits to the economy and environment, might exist. Our findings suggest that enthusiasm should be tempered for public policy commitments for green growth; despite unified green growth policy in G7 countries—significant differences are observed for both policy inputs and environmental/economic outputs. As a result, we caution policymakers and researchers against drawing generalised conclusions about the effectiveness of green growth policies, even among highly developed economies. Finally, our research draws attention to data deficiencies which, evidently, reduce more robust assessment across countries and over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The foremost purpose of the study is to establish a point that an economy of G-7 countries has an abundance of resources to tackle the environmental changes that occur in the world, but these countries are still behind the line because in this modern era, environmental performance changes their shape, dimension, and nature very frequently and create a huge impact on globalization of world economy. To fill this gap, we use green investment, institutional quality, and economic growth on environmental performance for this, we use four proxies for green investment and three proxies for greenhouse gas, and we also use six proxies of institutional quality to do this using period of 1997 to 2021. Moreover, we have used the panel nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag method to evaluate the long-run and short-run asymmetric effects of green investment, institutional quality, and economic growth on greenhouse gas emissions. The findings of the study affirm that the positive change of green investment has a positive and significant relationship with environmental performance, while the negative change of green investment has a significant and positive influence with environmental performance in the long run. Furthermore, the outcomes demonstrate that the positive shock of institutional quality has a positive and significant relationship with environmental performance, while the negative shock of intuitional quality has a significant and positive association with environmental performance in the long run, whereas positive change in economic growth has a positive and significant with the environmental performance, while the negative change of economic growth has a positive effect with environmental performance in the long run. This study finds future precautions that institutional quality has to perform exceptionally and shows results very rapidly, while green investment with economic growth has also made a deadly combination to control greenhouse gas emission, so the role of G-7 countries is pretty clear and straight. Furthermore, it is suggested that governments and policymakers take a proactive stance to promote resource acquisition and investment across all industries. To reduce gas emissions, public interest might also be complementary to private ones. So, economic policymakers, specifically in G-7 countries, should consider strategies that support sustainable economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a growth model whose novelty is to explicitly account for the direct, preference-related factors that reinforce the delay in the timing of childbearing. Given the strength of these factors, the model generates the empirically observed dynamics in completed cohort fertility. Furthermore, the quantitative analysis of our results verifies that our model provides a good fit for actual data of the rebound of the completed cohort fertility rates in Nordic countries. The fact that these countries are widely considered as the most progressive ones, in terms of their cultural norms and in terms of their family-oriented policies, offers credence to the hypothesis that our model advances. More generally, our framework provides a platform for research that can uncover empirically relevant, but yet unexplored, mechanisms in the joint analysis of demographic change and economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Numerous studies have been conducted, globally and locally, on the impact of the exchange rate on economic growth. In the local context, only a handful of research have investigated this area of study to determine the extent to which the Purchasing Managers' Index influence economic growth with the exchange rate, with limited research have been performed in Sri Lanka. This study explores the impact of exchange rate and Purchasing Managers' Index on economic growth. Consequently, adopting an applied research methodology, the present study was based on secondary data published quarterly by the Central Bank of Sri Lanka reports and the Department of Census and Statistics of Sri Lanka from 2015 to 2021. The Vector autoregression model and Granger Causality Wald test were performed in this study. The empirical findings highlighted that economic growth and Purchasing Managers' Index have a significant negative impact on the economic growth, while the exchange rate had a significant positive impact on the economic growth. Furthermore, the exchange rate and the Purchasing Managers' Index did not help to predict the exchange rate. The implications of the study demonstrate the relevance of the exchange rate and manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index as indicators of changes in overall economic growth activities at the macro level. The findings will assist the Sri Lankan Government, policymakers, and foreign investors for effective decision making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to ascertain whether there is an unbalanced link between CO2 emissions, foreign direct investment, and economic growth in Malaysia over a 40-year timeframe between 1980 and 2019. We investigated the asymmetric relationship , using non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) technique. The findings showed a noteworthy asymmetry between FDI, CO2 emissions, and GDP in Malaysia. The long-term and short-term effects of negative FDI on GDP are both equivalent to 0.028 and 0.021, respectively. This suggests that, compared to short-term fluctuations, long-term negative FDI adjustments have a considerably more negative impact on economic growth. The coefficient of positive (CO2+) and negative (CO2−) changes in economic growth is equal to 0.086 and − 0.152, respectively. It indicates that positive changes in CO2 emissions have stronger effects in the long run than negative shocks. Considering an asymmetric association between these two variables in the short and long term, Malaysian policymakers must comprehend the dynamic relationship between FDI, CO2 emissions, and GDP to plan appropriate economic and environmental policies that will support sustainable economic development and ensure a safer environment. [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]

This paper examines the asymmetric impacts of both renewable energy consumption and economic complexity on Saudi Arabia's economic growth in nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) frameworks. We firstly adopt the methodology of both standard NARDL and multiple threshold NARDL (MT-NARDL) models using quarterly data over the period 2000Q1–2015Q4. Then, we test the direction of the causal relationships between the underlying variables using both symmetric and asymmetric Granger causality tests. Our results from the standard NARDL model indicate that the long-term impact of a negative shock in renewable energy consumption on economic growth is significantly negative, while the short-term impact of either positive or negative shocks has a significant positive effect. Moreover, both positive and negative shocks in economic complexity have significant negative effects on economic growth in the long term, while economic growth is only affected by the negative change in economic complexity in the short term. Our estimates based on the best MT-NARDL model indicate that, in the long run, the effect of extremely large changes in renewable energy consumption is significantly different from the effect of small changes in renewable energy consumption on Saudi Arabia's economic growth. However, the effect of extremely large changes in economic complexity does not significantly differ from the effect of small changes in economic complexity on economic growth in the long run. Alternatively, in the short run, the effects of extremely large changes in both renewable energy consumption and economic complexity are not significantly different from the effects of small changes in those variables on economic growth. Finally, the symmetric/asymmetric causality nexus between positive/negative shocks to either renewable energy consumption or economic complexity and positive/negative shocks to economic growth is found to be neutral. The findings of this study provide deeper insights into the relationship between renewable energy consumption, economic complexity, and economic growth in Saudi Arabia and can be used for recommending different policies in the long run and short run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines the relationship between ICT diffusion and climate change for a global panel of 92 countries for the period 1990 to 2018. The study constructs an index of ICT diffusion through principal component analysis and utilizes estimation techniques such as pooled ordinary least squares, the fixed effects model and the system generalized method of moments with panel corrected standard errors. Our study finds that in general, ICT diffusion mitigates CO2 emissions; however, financial development worsens climatic changes. Moreover, the findings indicate that higher levels of economic growth take care of CO2 emissions for the full sample and developing countries but not for the developed countries. On the other hand, trade openness shows differential impacts for developed and developing countries, suggesting that carbon implications of trade openness depend on the country's regulatory authority and ecological regulations. The study concludes that trade policies and financial development need to be rationalized for sustainable development. However, ICT diffusion should be encouraged as it leads to the mitigation of CO2 emissions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The need for a cleaner environment and wealthier economies has been highly recognized by European Union (EU) policymakers of the last years, as evidenced by the creation of a plethora of laws and regulations for reducing carbon dioxide emissions while promoting the economic prosperity of EU countries. Indeed, many works have been done in this field, remarking on climate change's impacts on economies and the need for determinant environmental policies inside the EU. This paper investigates the effect of climate change on economic growth using nonlinear dynamic panel methods for 15 countries of the EU in the period 1981–2019. Specifically, it is examined the impact of temperature, precipitation, and CO2 emissions on economic growth. So, autoregressive distributed lags (ARDL) methods were employed, overcoming cross-dependency and also considering linearity and nonlinearity. The results showed that economic growth has positive nonlinear relationship with long-run temperature, but in short-run they have a symmetric negative association. Moreover, precipitation has long-run negative and a short-run positive relationship with economic growth. However, when CO2 emissions are added, then model's performance is decreased, and precipitation has a positive effect on economic growth, but all others, except from temperature increase, become insignificant. Finally, actions should be taken for more stable climate conditions and consistent environmental policies by EU countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The controversies on the relationship (called 'gradient') between the time trend of GDP and of subjective well-being oppose those who claim that the gradient is positive, to those who argue that it is nil. The possible existence of significant changes of the two trends and of the gradient within the same country is a challenge to both views. By focusing on the case of Italy, we show that the long-run trends of GDP and of well-being turned from increasing to decreasing, and that the gradient exhibits a rise through two structural breaks. This evidence is consistent with the 'loss aversion' hypothesis. From this macro-analysis we further go into micro-analysis to explain why subjective well-being declined so steeply. We find that the erosion of trust in others, the increase of financial dissatisfaction, worsened health, and greater importance of income contribute to the decline of subjective well-being. As far as we know, this is the first attempt to test the role of loss aversion in the long run using both macro- and micro-economic approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This empirical study investigates the dynamic effects of economic freedom on economic growth and air quality for Pakistan over the period 1990–2019. The ARDL results suggest that economic freedom and other variables do not have any visible impact on economic growth and pollution in the short-run. However, in the long-run, economic freedom significantly mitigates air pollution whereas inflation instability increases emissions. The NARDL results show that a partial sum of positive change in economic freedom is negatively linked with economic growth in the short term but has positive effect in the long term. However, the negative change in economic freedom has negative but insignificant impact on growth confirming asymmetric effects. The results for the pollution model show that a partial sum of positive change in economic freedom has positive impact on emissions both in the short and long-runs, whereas a negative change has no significant effect in the short-run and has negative impact in the long-run. Thus, economic freedom supports economic activities that, in turn, escalate emissions in the atmosphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Global energy demand increases overtime, especially in emerging market economies, producing potential negative environmental impacts, particularly on the long term, on nature and climate changes. Promoting renewables is a robust policy action in world energy-based economies. This study examines if an increase in renewables production has a positive effect on the Brazilian economy, partially offsetting the SARS-CoV2 outbreak recession. Using data on Brazilian economy, we test the contribution of renewables on the economy via a ML architecture (through a LSTM model). Empirical findings show that an ever-greater use of renewables may sustain the economic growth recovery, generating a better performing GDP acceleration vs. other energy variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

China has experienced profound economic and social changes in recent decades. During this period, China's fiscal policy framework has been substantially reformed. The objective of this paper is to better understand the key features of the Chinese fiscal system and their impact on China's economic growth. The study performs empirical analysis to identify the relationship between fiscal policy variables and economic growth. Its evidence suggests that local expenditures growth has a larger impact on output growth than central expenditures growth. The results also reveal that the response of output growth to anticipated changes in taxation was impeded by liquidity constraints. During the initial stages of market-oriented reform, growth of public investment in manufacturing sector contributed the most to output growth. During more recent periods, public investment in R&D made a substantial contribution. In addition, evidence indicates that long-term debt has a significant influence on China's fiscal system, especially on government revenues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the significant changes of economic growth rate, energy structure, and energy efficiency in China, whether energy policies should be adjusted is worthy of attention. This paper employs ARDL-ECM and Toda-Yamamoto causality to investigate the relationship between renewable energy, non-renewable energy, carbon emissions, economic growth, gross fixed capital formation, and urban population spanning the period 1960–2019 in China. The examined results of ARDL-ECM indicate that renewable energy both have positive impact on GDP in the short term and long term but non-renewable energy only have positive impact on GDP in the short term. Additionally, based on Toda-Yamamoto causality, this paper finds a unidirectional Granger causality running from economic growth to energy consumption and from energy consumption to carbon emissions. And there is a unidirectional Granger causality running from GDP to non-renewable energy consumption. It is worth noting that renewable energy consumption and economic growth have positive bidirectional influence on each other. The study findings suggest that stricter energy conservation and pollution emission reduction policy should be implemented and renewable energy should be applied on a larger scale in order to achieve the goal of sustainable economic development. [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]

The well-established emissions-growth debate relies on the symmetric nexus between CO2 emissions and economic growth, thereby ignoring a fundamental component of macro economy in the form of asymmetric relation. This paper considers how CO2 emissions respond asymmetrically to changes in economic growth. While utilizing both linear and nonlinear time series approaches for an environmentally exposed country, Pakistan over the period 1971–2018, we find convincing evidence that CO2 emissions rise more rapidly during negative shocks to economic growth than increase during economic expansions. Thus, contrary to what has previously been reported, the effect is strong as holds both at short run and long run. This is partly due to the increase in informal sector as GDP declines. Our estimated results show that accounting for the shadow economy results a higher magnitude of CO2 emissions due to decrease in economic growth, thus question the traditional symmetric decoupling of economic growth and CO2 emissions. The estimated results are robust to alternative estimators such as fully modified least squares (FMOLS) and dynamic OLS (DOLS). Thus, the findings of this study call for a re-thinking on climate policy design that rarely pays attention to the aforementioned outcomes due to fall in economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth has remained somewhat contentious. While it is almost universally acknowledged that entrepreneurship and particularly knowledge-intensive entrepreneurship has apparent and important links to economic growth, studies to elaborate exactly how each of these factors influences economic growth return inconsistent findings. However, the measure of economic growth we suggest is too broad as an outcome metric to account for the sector of the economy that most directly contributes to the dynamics of economic growth. In this paper, we take a more nuanced approach to consider in what way and whether increasing economic complexity is related to the efficiency with which a country produces growth. We argue from a holistic innovation system (HIS) perspective that the combination of both knowledge-intensive and broader market–led business innovation will more rapidly improve the productivity levels of nations by utilising the diversity of knowledge and business resources available to that country. To test this hypothesis, we employ a dynamic version of the two-stage data envelopment analysis. We conclude that the increased economic diversity measured by the change in economic complexity can be treated as a much more refined outcome effect of a country's HIS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We build a dynamic model with endogenous middle class development, human capital accumulation, and policy choices, in order to analyze the interactions between the optimal policies implemented by the ruling elite and the key drivers of economic growth in the presence of elite rivalry. We consider that: (1) the specific policy choices depend on economic and political incentives of the elite; (2) the individuals' decisions regarding their children's education are endogenously determined by specific economic and political factors. Our results suggest that, contrarily to the economically motivated policies, the politically motivated policy choices imply inefficient economic outcomes and limit the development of the middle class and human capital accumulation. The results also show that higher middle class and human capital accumulation growth rates can lower the degree of elite rivalry by reducing the level of the optimal tax rate, increase public investments in education, and yield positive changes in all economic outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the world's largest emitter, China's reduction of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions is crucial for the achievement of global temperature rise goals. In this paper, we employed input-output structural decomposition analysis and index decomposition analysis to assess the factors driving changes in China's CO2 emissions from 2000 to 2018, with particular attention to the role of renewable energy development. Our results indicate that the slowdown of economic growth and rapid structural change, rather than the shifting fuel mix, were the major forces driving China's recent slowdown of CO2 emissions ever since 2011. Despite the great importance attached to renewable energy development, non-hydro renewable has played negligible role in reducing China's CO2 emissions. This suggests that China cannot simply rely on the large-scale development of renewable energies to achieve its Paris 2015 target and must make further drastic cuts that will help keep global temperature rise well below 2 °C above pre-industrial level. Major breakthroughs in scalable low carbon energy sources and technologies will be required, especially in the developing world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technological evolution is widely thought to be the primary process that brings about economic growth. It is one of the main targets of evolutionary economics, but how technological change induces economic growth has remained unexplained. Based on the new theory of value, this paper explains how technological change leads to long-run improvement in real wage rates and income per capita. Section 2 gives a brief overview of the new theory and presents two theorems (minimal price and the convergence theorem) that afford the basis of analyses in Sections 4 and 5. Before these, Section 3 compares two price systems, traditional and new, and compares efficiency from two points of view. Traditionally economics with equilibrium has been concerned with those conditions that provide allocative efficiency. However, technological evolution comprises a series of half-blind selections of 'better' production techniques and exhibits another kind of efficiency that can be named dynamic efficiency. The latter is more important than the former. Allocative efficiency is self-destructive, while dynamic efficiency is cumulative in its effects. Section 4 shows how technological change works cumulatively and how it leads to real wage increases and income per capita. Section 5 shows that the new theory can explain the emergence and growth of global value supply chains as a part of technology choice arising through international trade. This paper is mainly focused on supply-side theory, while problems concerning the demand side are considered in Section 6. Section 7 concludes. [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]

When technologies could be "dirty" and "clean" in the context of green development, technical change does not necessarily mean (green) productivity growth. This paper studies the nonlinear impact of technical change on green productivity in China by applying a panel smooth transition regression approach with a panel data set of 284 prefecture-level cities from 2004 to 2015. Green productivity is measured by the meta-frontier Malmquist–Luenberger productivity growth (MML) index. Technical change is considered in three dimensions: indigenous technical change indicated by the stock of knowledge based on patents, technology transfers from foreign direct investment (FDI), and absorptive capacity. We find a non-linear relationship between technical change and green productivity contingent on specific economic situations and the city's endowment of natural resources. In general, indigenous technical change shows an adverse effect on green productivity in China, which is much more prominent in the resource-dependent cities than in the non-resource-dependent cities. Technology transfers from FDI may either improve or hinder green productivity growth as economic situations change, while absorptive capacity has a small but positive effect. Also, these two effects are affected by the city's endowment of natural resources. Accordingly, we discuss some policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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]