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Hundreds of millions of people on the planet are affected by malnourishment. This contributes to the vulnerability of large swaths of the population, especially children under five years old extremely vulnerable to diseases and even death in the least developed countries. Today, by providing a substantial share of global protein intake, as well as fatty acids and micronutrients, fisheries contribute to global food security. As fish stocks in the upper sea levels have already been over-exploited, there might not be enough in supplying food security, deep-sea fisheries have been increasingly discussed to address this problem. Some mesopelagic fishes show the potential to provide important nutrients. Another way of supplying food security might be through using mesopelagic fish as fish feed. However, fishing in the mesopelagic zone could lead to severe ecological problems and the impact on the biological carbon pump is uncertain. This paper highlights and juxtaposes different perspectives regarding exploitation pathways of the fish riches of deep seas and reviews best practice model projects that deal with uncertainties related to fishery management in the mesopelagic zone.

This study revisits the relationship between economic variables and alcohol consumption from a macro perspective. Focusing explicitly on the asymmetries of the responsiveness of alcohol consumption during the expansion and contraction phases of the business cycle, asymmetric panel estimators are employed. We employ a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model for a panel of 24 countries for the period 1961 to 2014. Findings show that expansion leads to a long-term increase in average alcohol consumption, while during contraction, the level of average alcohol consumption persists. Expansion, together with a pronounced reduction in the unemployment rate could, however, lead to a net reduction of gross alcohol and wine consumption. Nonetheless, if the recession corresponds with a surge in unemployment, this leads to a long-run increase in the level of total gross alcohol consumption but a decrease in wine and beer consumption. Reduction in unemployment does not lead to a reduction in beer consumption, as pre-expansion levels of beer consumption persist. (JEL Classifications: E32, I19, L66)

Public debt is a notable measure of economic and financial sustainability which encountered policy and scholarly interest in the international development ambients. This paper investigates the major drivers of public debt growth in 184 countries. The underlying cross-country survey is conducted on the basis of the improved compilation of datasets on the central government debt for 2013. The study finds that oil abundance, economic growth rate, the share of mineral rent in the total revenue, interest rate payments for foreign borrowings, and being a developing country have a statistically significant impact on the growth of the public debt. In contrast, defence spending, unemployment rate, and inflation rate do not have a statistically significant positive impact on the public debt rate.Keywords: Public Debt, Natural Resources, Sustainability, Oil Rent, Mineral Rent, Defence Spending, Developing CountriesJEL Classifications: F21, F34, F36, G15, H6, N1, F3DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/ijeep.10901

The present study addresses the mediating role of social support in the relationship between employee resilience and employee engagement. A cross-sectional design was adopted to collect data from a sample of 260 registered nurses working in public hospitals in Lagos, Nigeria. The findings suggest that employee resilience is significantly related to social support and employee engagement. However, the quantitative analysis could not establish a significant mediation role of social support in the relationship between employee resilience and employee engagement. Based on the results, this research provides empirical evidence for the importance of employee resilience to greater employee engagement.

The present inquiry focuses on the modernization perspectives of the commodity‐exporting countries through the lens of development economics. To this end, the study adopts the Kaldorian framework to address the modernization effects, epitomized in the absorption of surplus labor. To trace the process of economic modernization, the study augments Lewis’s dualistic economy model by the extractive sector. Three different scenarios for the management of resource revenues are scrutinized. An altruistic mode, which implies a pure redistribution of the revenues among the poor swaths of the population, protracts the process of economic modernization, requires a greater amount of capital stock, and harbors a greater risk of a poverty trap. This effect is less pronounced if the modern sector is more capital‐intensive. A productive mode, which elicits full reinvestment of the commodity revenues, in contrast, accelerates the pace of economic modernization. Further, predicated on the scrutiny of a more realistic scenario, a bargaining mode, the study derives the condition for a net positive (or negative) modernization effect. The study identifies technical progress alongside capital accumulation as a further important source of economic modernization.

This survey addresses production and employment effects, which emanate from the extractive industries of Kazakhstan. To this end, the study employs static input-output models (IOMs) of Kazakhstan f...

After almost two decades of continuous development in bio, circular, and green economy, it is time to assess the major achievements and challenges that private and public enterprises face today for further enhancing global sustainability concepts. To this end, the present thematic issue accommodates twenty articles on different topics related to circular economy development and green growth, proposing a contribution to the field of environmental economics and policy. The central feature of this Special Issue is the focus on the best practices and challenges in terms of green growth and eco-innovation in developing and transitioning structurally challenged areas. Hence, the study elaborates on the pathways of bio, circular, and green growth and eco-innovation in the context of countries with relatively low per capita income. By doing this, the collection shows that the empirically established environmental Kuznets curve—i.e., the inverted U-shaped income-environment nexus—can and must be critically questioned, at least in the contexts mentioned within the framework of our Special Issue. Hence, the geographic frontiers of environmental upgrading, carbon-saving bioeconomic development, and green growth are not limited to the economically advanced areas.

This research paper aims to address the problem of financial inclusion and resilience in the current sustainable development framework. The development agenda designs access to finance a human right and a prior strategy to achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Microfinance can play a decisive role in smoothing the risk of adverse events It acts as resilience policy, tackling vulnerability and poverty, empowering people and vulnerable categories and improving and enlarging their capabilities. This work explores the existing connections between the development agenda and microfinance as a strategy to foster financial access. To this end, summative content analysis is performed on the United Nations General Assembly Resolution A/RES/69/315 - fulfilling a research gap. This inquiry handles 6 selected SDGs, ascribable to 3 dimensions, detecting 5 sub-dimensions and 16 domains. Analysing Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, the study also finds increased importance attributed to the topic, key issues and policy strengths and limitations. Importantly, the analysis shows that the environmental dimension is still neglected in the analysed corpus, not appearing in any of the examined SDGs. The findings suggest investing in these channels, drafting governance patterns and modelling resilience and development policy to vehiculate improved ecological and institutional results and concerns.

The present paper dwells on the role of green hydrogen in the transition towards climate-neutral economies and reviews the central challenges for its emancipation as an economically viable source of energy. The study shows that countries with a substantial share of renewables in the energy mix, advanced natural gas pipeline infrastructure, and an advanced level of technological and economic development have a comparative advantage for the wider utilization of hydrogen in their national energy systems. The central conclusion of this review paper is that a green hydrogen rollout in the developed and oil-exporting developing and emerging countries is not a risk for the rest of the world in terms of the increasing technological disparities and conservation of underdevelopment and concomitant socio-economic problems of the Global South. The targets anchored in Paris Agreement, but even more in the EU Green Deal and the European Hydrogen Strategy will necessitate a substantial rollout of RESs in developing countries, and especially in the countries of the African Union because of the prioritization of the African continent within the energy cooperation frameworks of the EU Green Deal and the EU Hydrogen Strategy. Hence, the green hydrogen rollout will bridge the energy transition between Europe and Africa on the one hand, and climate and development targets on the other.

This survey investigates the inequality-fine wine imports nexus. To this end, the study employs cointegration techniques to analyze two panel datasets, one of which will analyze data from 12 countries between 1871 and 2018, and another that analyzes data from 66 countries between 1995 and 2017. Estimations indicate that income inequality leads to more fine wine imports in the long run. Changes in income have only a short-term effect on fine wine imports. Nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) estimators reveal an asymmetric long-run relationship between income inequality and fine wine imports in the cases of Argentina and the United States. (JEL Classifications: C19, D01, D12, D31, L66)

In this paper, we address the production linkages and employment effects of the petroleum sector on the rest of the Azerbaijani economy. The availability of the input-output tables for the years 2006, 2008, and 2009 enables the assessment of the changes with regard to the multiplier effects of the extractive industries over the first 3 years of the oil boom. We find that despite advanced infrastructure, well-developed petrochemical complex, and local content policies, the degree of integration of the international oil and gas business into the domestic economy is rather weak. In addition, both production and job creation multipliers slightly decreased after 3 years of exponential growth rates of oil production. The assessment of the production multipliers indicates that additional investments in processing, construction, and network industries have the highest production linkages. Concerning employment multipliers agriculture, education, health care, and public sector have the greatest job creation effects. To assess the fiscal employment effects of the oil revenues, which cannot be captured over the static input-output analysis, we employ the cointegrating nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model. The model reveals a sustainable job creation effect of oil revenues in the case of Azerbaijan.

We embed the distributional bargaining concept in Sir Arthur Lewis’s labor surplus economy setting. In the petroleum-abundant labor surplus economies, distributional bargaining comes into its own, mainly over the subsidization of the large swaths of the population working in the sectors with substantial amounts of disguised unemployment. These are primarily the subsistence agriculture and the public sector. Based on the open-loop noncooperative differential game model, we derive three feasible bargaining equilibria, whereby only the antagonistic and the allocation modes are compatible with the setting of inferior institutional quality that dominates most natural-resource-dependent countries. We scrutinize both modes in the framework of the dual economy model and show that political bargaining in the allocation mode unambiguously protracts the process of economic modernization. The outcome of the antagonistic mode for the process of structural change depends on the magnitude of the labor cost increase in this phase. To assess the bargaining–modernization nexus empirically, we employ mostly pooled mean group (PMG) estimators for panel datasets spanning the years 1990–2016 for 21 oil-producing countries. For the system generalized method of moments (GMM) panel estimations, we employ a panel with 82 countries. We find that the revenues generated from exports of natural resources have a positive long-run impact on the economic modernization. Consistent with our theoretical model, the interaction of the authoritarian regime type with the natural resource wealth has a robust negative impact on the indicators of economic modernization.

Petroleum-reliant developing and transition economies account for 15–20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. This group of countries have a disproportionately high share of oil and natural gas in their energy mix and a relatively high carbon footprint over their petroleum value chains. The present data set is an extensive compilation of the essential indicators related to economy, energy, environmental pollution, and institutional quality of 38 oil and gas producing developing and transition economies in the time interval spanning between 1989 and 2019. The data set can serve as a basis for the macroeconomic analysis of energy, environment, social and institutional issues in this group of countries and draft further industry explorations as well as sustainable development policy analyses and recommendations. Furthermore, based on the mentioned data series, we propose three novel indexes – i.e. Energy Sector Development Indexes I, II, and III. Those indexes are developed in the context of fossil fuel abundant settings. Despite focusing on the fossil fuel abundant settings, the Energy Sector Development Indexes could be expanded for petroleum and coal scarce countries as well.

This chapter explores the foreseeable repercussions of South East Europe (SEE) energy transition in terms of regional sustainability, resilience, vulnerability, and energy security. It examines enhancement of the natural gas pipelines in the framework of the Southern Gas Corridor, its broad ramifications for the SEE, as well as consequences for regional integration in energy security in the area. The chapter argues that natural gas will be relevant within the decarbonization pathway, coal-to-renewables transition, and energy security over the full transition toward a low-carbon economy. A moderate share of natural gas in the energy mix contributes to the robustness of the decarbonization strategy over the reduction of the growing electricity intermittency risk that emanates from the growing share of the renewables in the energy mix. Regardless of the undertaken landscape and energy mix, the decarbonization targets should not be subject to trade-offs with purely economic targets in the face of the short- to middle-term economic turmoils.

The present inquiry addresses the income-environment relationship in oil-producing countries and scrutinizes the further drivers of atmospheric pollution in the respective settings. The existing literature that tests the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis within the framework of the black-box approaches provides only a bird’s-eye perspective on the long-run income-environment relationship. The aspiration behind this study is making the first step toward the disentanglement of the sources of carbon dioxide emissions, which could be employed in the pollution mitigation policies of this group of countries. Based on the combination of two strands of literature, the environmental Kuznets curve conjecture and the resource curse, the paper at hand proposes an augmented theoretical framework of this inquiry. To approach the research questions empirically, the study employs advanced panel cointegration techniques. To avoid econometric misspecification, the study also employs for the first time a nonparametric time-varying coefficient panel data estimator with fixed effects (NPFE) for the dataset of 37 oil-producing countries in the time interval spanning between 1989 and 2019. The empirical analysis identifies the level of per capita income, the magnitude of oil rents, the share of fossil fuel-based electricity generation in the energy mix, and the share of the manufacturing sector in GDP as essential drivers of carbon dioxide emissions in the oil-rich countries. Tertiarization, on the contrary, leads to a substantial reduction of emissions. Another striking result of this study is that level of political rights and civil liberties are negatively associated with per capita carbon emissions in this group of countries. Furthermore, the study decisively rejects an inverted U-shaped income-emission relationship and validates the monotonically or exponentially increasing impact of average income on carbon dioxide emissions.

The present inquiry provides a common ground for the analysis of two strands of literature, the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) and the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH). To this end, the study sets out a simple variational model, which identifies the structural composition of the economy and the level of economic development as the primary determinants of the magnitude of the domestic environmental degradation. The juxtaposition of the mentioned literature strands undermines the optimistic view that economic growth, in the long run, leads to the reduction of atmospheric pollution. To assess the empirical validity of the pollution haven conjecture, the study employs the OECD Environmental Policy Stringency Index and the refined data on carbon emissions embodied in imports for the dataset of 26 OECD countries in the time interval between 1995 and 2011. By employing pooled mean group (PMG) estimators, the study, for the first time, accounts for a number of issues mentioned in the literature as factors that confine the inferential power of existing empirical studies on the EKC. The strong and robust confirmation of the pollution haven conjecture indicates that at least in the context of global common pool resources, a purely national perspective of the EKC is not satisfactory.

The present inquiry lays a groundwork for the analysis of the net greenhouse gas (GHG) footprint of oil in the oil-abundant settings. To address the research question, the study puts forward a three-sector decision model, which provides a common ground for the assessment of the interaction of the structuralist and institutional factors influencing environmental pollution in the oil-reliant economies. The study shows that fossil-fuel abundance triggers forces, which induce diametrically opposed effects concerning atmospheric pollution. These are the rising carbon-intensive oil extraction and processing and fossil-fueled power generation versus shrinkage of the carbon-intensive manufacturing and growth of the low-carbon tertiarization. The theoretical analysis enables compartmentalization of the essential factors, which determine GHG emissions in the respective countries. To assess the significance of the proposed theoretical framework, the study employs multivariate panel co-integration techniques and two-stage fixed effects estimations for a dataset of 38 oil-producing countries for the time period between 1960 and 2018. In contrast to the existing literature, this study drives apart from the black box approaches that employ just one omnibus variable, per capita income.

This study puts forward a model of a multisector economy and embeds it in a novel theoretical framework to address the relationship between commodity revenues and manufacturing output with a special focus on the role of the agricultural sector. The three-sector model lays the groundwork for analyzing policy choices in more complex sectoral settings. Based on the theoretical analysis, the study identifies the weight of the individual economic sectors in the public revenue generation as a determinant of the magnitude of rent seeking epitomized in the crowding out effect of investments in manufacturing. We find that enclave agriculture contributes to the deindustrialization pressure in the face of natural resource windfalls. The central finding of the multisector analysis is the conclusion that not diversification per se but rather a diversification with the substantial domestic factor or market orientation has the capability to limit the magnitude of deindustrialization. For the empirical validation of the theoretical findings, the study employs fixed effects, fully modified OLS, dynamic common correlated effects estimators and dynamic fixed effects estimators for the dataset of 113 developing and transition economies for 1963&ndash, 2014 period. The estimations reveal that natural resource revenues correspond with a higher level of the manufacturing sector output. In the economies with a low level of economic diversification, commodity bonanza leads however to the shrinkage of the manufacturing. In the commodity revenue dependent settings, nevertheless, agricultural sector exports have a negative impact on the performance of the manufacturing sector. These findings are in line with the predictions of the theoretical model.

This paper investigates the major drivers of the public debt growth in 184 countries. The underlying cross-country survey is conducted on the basis of the improved compilation of datasets on the central government debt for 2013. The study finds that oil abundance, economic growth rate, the share of mineral rent in the total revenue, interest rate payments for foreign borrowings, and being a developing country have statistically significant impact on the growth of the public debt. In contrast, defense spending, unemployment rate, and inflation rate do not have a statistically significant positive impact on the public debt rate.