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The agricultural value chain is underpinned by the interdependence of agricultural value added, household consumption and domestic investment. Understanding the complex interactions between these microeconomic outcomes and the uncertainties in the macroeconomic variables of exchange rates, energy prices and sectoral spending remains under-researched. Therefore, this study examines the impact of exchange rate, energy prices and sectoral spending on agricultural value added, household consumption and domestic investment in Nigeria from 1981 to 2020. Using Kernel regularized least squares (KRLS), the results show that the average pointwise marginal effects of exchange rate and agricultural spending are positive, while the average pointwise marginal effect of energy price is significantly negative for the agricultural value-added model. The results also show that the exchange rate, energy prices and agricultural expenditure all have a positive effect on household consumption. Regarding domestic investment, the effect of the exchange rate is positive and statistically insignificant, while the effects of energy prices and agricultural expenditure are negative and statistically significant. The study recommends the need to strengthen the social safety nets currently in place in Nigeria to support households that are vulnerable to exchange rate fluctuations. In addition, incentives should be given to households and farmers to help use renewable energy sources such as solar or wind power for agricultural activities. Also, investment in value chains and agribusiness initiatives should be encouraged rather than just in crop production., Competing Interests: The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (© 2024 The Authors.)

The 21 st century economic growth is characterized by extensive production and consumption, which increases anthropogenic emissions. However, reducing emission levels require ecological sustainability through innovation and modern technological consideration. This paper investigated not only renewable energy-driven environmental quality but also captured innovation research investment in renewables within the framework of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) model for G-7 countries. The findings confirmed the presence of EKC hypothesis for G-7 countries. In addition, renewable energy and innovation were identified to exert negative effects on ecological footprint. To capture the entire conditional distribution of the ecological footprint, we applied the Method of Moments Quantile Regression with fixed-effects. The results affirmed the negative effects of renewable energy innovation. Besides, their effects were heterogeneous across the quantiles with evidence of diminishing effects from lower to higher quantiles, suggesting that countries with lower levels of ecological footprint are possibly more prone to the environmental deterioration effect of income growth. The results of the causality test support economic growth-induced ecological degradation, growth-induced renewables, and innovation-induced ecological conservation. The results further showed a feedback effect between renewables and ecological footprint, innovation, and income growth as well as innovation and renewables. These findings portend important implications for the realization of carbon-free economies in G-7 countries by 2100., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest., (© 2021 The Author(s).)

Trade has become a carrier for transporting both clean and dirty (pollution-intensive) goods, services and technologies between countries. While the impact of trade on economic development has been reported in the extant literature, insufficient and inconsistent results exist between pollution-embedded trade and environmental performance. Using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Generalized method of moments and panel quantiles via Moments, this study explored the role of government integrity on trade-environment nexus in the post-Kyoto protocol era for 79 countries between 2008 and 2018. The empirical results suggest that per capita GDP and government integrity improve environmental performance whereas trade impedes it. In the quantile regression model, the effect of government integrity is significant at the median quantiles with a stronger effect in countries with higher environmental performance. The negative effect of trade is not only significant from the lower quantile through the median quantile but decreases in magnitude, tracking from countries with lower to higher environmental performance. While the positive effect of government integrity is significant from the median quantile onwards, the negative effect of trade is only significant in the lower quantile. Robustness analysis from the GMM dynamic panel estimation technique shows that interacting government integrity with trade yields a positive and significant coefficient. Meaning that improved government integrity averts the negative effect of trade on environmental performance. The study suggests that outsourcing the regulations of trade-oriented multinational companies operating in developing economies with weak institutions to global humanitarian organisations such as the United Nations would be the first step to reduce trade-attributable environmental degradation., (© 2020 The Author(s).)