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Rapid urbanization, openness and growth in human development index are some of the leading determinants of energy consumption in developing countries, particularly in BRICS economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa). Thanks to their innate tendency to converge to the growth path of developed nations, BRICS countries are under increasing pressure to limit high energy consumption — triggered by outsourcing from developed nations. This paper attempts to weigh the relative importance of various determinants of energy consumption in BRICS countries between 1980 and 2016, studying in-depth the long-run co-movement pattern of energy consumption with demographic characteristics (depicting demand pressure) and macroeconomic aggregates (depicting cheap production cost). By leveraging on the trade-off between domestic and foreign demand and by employing the autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach, we establish differential effects of various predictors: whilst an increase in population growth rate, gross domestic product and capital account openness exert a positive and significant impact on energy consumption in Brazil, China and South Africa, foreign direct investment (FDI) and human development appear to enhance energy consumption in India, China and South Africa. The growth in external demand and the FDI inflows appear to have pushed urbanization, leading to greater energy consumption during the study period. Keeping in mind the sustainability goal, stronger green energy practices and sustainable urbanization patterns are needed to curb excessive energy sources.

This study examines the relationship between electricity consumption, trade openness and economic growth in 25 African countries during 1980–2016. It disaggregates electricity into renewable and non-renewable and disaggregates trade into exports and imports. It employs cointegration and Granger causality techniques that enable us to determine both joint and individual causality, as well as account for individual heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence. It also uses the variance decompositions (VDs) and impulse response functions (IRFs). This study shows a short-run and long-run joint causality from electricity and trade to growth, as well as a short-run and long-run joint causality from trade and growth to electricity. Besides, the Dumitrescu–Hurlin Granger non-causality technique shows a bidirectional causality between electricity and growth and between trade and growth but a unidirectional causality from electricity to trade. It also reveals the causal relationships from exports, imports, renewable and non-renewable electricity to growth. This study implies that electricity consumption and trade openness stimulate growth, while the latter also determines electricity consumption and trade openness. Based on the findings, we recommend some policy options.

This study examines the effect of trade openness on financial development in eight representative ASEAN countries, including Singapore. Low levels of exports and imports positively influence the depth, accessibility, and efficiency of financial development. Beyond a certain threshold, the benefits of trade openness for financial development begin to diminish. This threshold is lower than the mean value of trade openness, indicating that the ASEAN market possesses high trade flows but its financial sector remains of low quality. In the ASEAN region, the current financial development index is suboptimal compared to trade openness. Prioritizing improvements in financial development quality is thus crucial for mitigating the potential risks associated with excessive trade openness.

Many countries in Asia and the Pacific have experienced rapid economic growth and structural transformation in recent decades. Yet, some countries are still at an early stage of this structural transformation and face external conditions less favorable than those faced by the first movers when they were at a similar early stage in their transformation. The external environment is less auspicious, with trade tensions and “friend-shoring” leading to possible deglobalization, while demographic headwinds could also lower sustainable growth rates and induce technological changes, such as the increased use of robots, that reduce the possibility of relying upon labor-intensive development strategies.

This paper examines the short and long-run relationships between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), Trade Openness and GDP in China, India and Mexico from 1980 to 2011. Based on the properties of individual time series data, the paper estimates the VAR or VECM of the three variables to determine short and long-run causal relationships. The results confirm the existence of long-run causal relationships between the three variables for China and Mexico. The results also point to sharp differences in short-run causal relationships in the three countries and several plausible explanations consistent with the findings are offered.

Many studies have investigated the causal relationship between economic growth and the depth in the stock market, between economic growth and trade openness, or between economic growth and foreign direct investment. Advancing on earlier work, this paper uses vector error-correction and cointegration techniques in order to establish whether there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between all four variables. We consider a sample of 25 ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) countries which are studied over the period 1961–2012. Our analysis, which combines various strands of the literature, establishes the direction of causality between the variables. Policy recommendations include the encouragement of mutual fund investment by smaller investors to increase stock market depth as well as methods to increase foreign direct investment, such as tax holidays.

The decline in the share of labor income — an indicator of functional income distribution — has contributed to rising income inequality world-wide. Despite a growing literature, little is known about the effects of globalization on the labor share or inequality in Asia where some of the economies are most globalized. Applying fixed-effect regressions to panel data from 29 Asian economies over the period from 1980 to 2014, we focus on the impacts of globalization on the labor share in Asia where globalization is measured by trade openness and FDI. The modeling results show that trade openness is a significant determinant of the labor share. More specifically, the impact of export is significantly negative and the impact of import is positive. In terms of FDI, the coefficient of the inward FDI is significantly positive and that of the outward FDI is significantly negative in developing countries only.

Pakistan liberalized its trade in different regimes and the recent trade reforms is CPEC project which is expected to reduce wages inequality of skilled and unskilled labor. This study forecasts wages inequality as a result of trade openness in Pakistan by using artificial neural network approach for the period 1991–2017. The empirical outcomes revealed that trade liberalization is influential factor for reducing wages inequality in Pakistan, and the forecasting results for 2019–2026 show a dynamic trend of wages inequality in the response to trade liberalization; however, in many of the years, the positive implication has been witnessed for the inequality.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of financial development (FD) on the share of renewable energy (RE) usage in Japan. The existing theoretical literature and empirical analyses covering different country cases reveal that FD might have positive, negative, or insignificant effect on RE use. Since there is no empirical investigation of the issue for Japan, the study aims to contribute to the literature. To that end, we used several time-series techniques to detect the association between RE usage and FD in Japan over the 1970–2020 period. The results obtained from the ARDL, Hatemi-J, Maki, Tsong et al. and NARDL cointegration tests showed that there is a significant cointegrated relationship between the share of RE use, FD, GDP per capita and trade openness. As for the long-run coefficients obtained from the ARDL, FMOLS, CCR and NARDL estimators revealed that increases in FD and trade openness raise the share of RE usage while increases in GDP per capita reduce it. Briefly, for the Japan case, we may suggest that improving the financial market structure of the country will bear fruit in terms of the share of cleaner and sustainable energy usage.

Trade openness plays a critical role in the growth of China and its partners. Using a system generalized method of moments (system GMM) estimator and quantile regression, a new viewpoint is presented on trade openness in China for institutional and economic factors over 15 years with 192 economies. The empirical findings provide two contrasting views. Intriguingly, China is seeking to broaden this strategy to countries with less control over corruption and low political stability. By categorizing countries as advanced, emerging, and developing, the study provides the evidence that exchange rate volatility has a negative effect on trade openness, while investment, labor force, and broad money share a positive impact. This study suggests that Chinese policymakers should further boost financial reform to promote trade development. Other countries desirous of greater trade openness with China should have more efficient management of macroscopic economic factors. Finally, the study also examines the two main groups of international offshore financial center from econometric convergence test and club clustering for trade openness in China from the worldwide perspective.

The nexus between trade openness and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions remains unsettled in the existing literature. Using a balanced panel dataset for 76 countries from 1990 to 2019, this study empirically investigates the non-linear relationship between trade openness and CO₂ emissions. Given the potential cross-sectional interdependence in the panel, we employ the system-generalised method of moments. We also conduct a mediating effect analysis to explore potential mediation effect in the trade openness-CO₂ nexus. Finally, the regional heterogeneity is discussed. The empirical results revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between trade openness and CO₂ emissions, indicating that CO₂ emissions increase initially with an expansion of trade openness, then decline after trade openness crossing the turning point. Furthermore, three mediation effects (i.e. scale effect, technique effect and composition effect) exist in the nexus between trade openness and CO₂ emissions. Additionally, the impact of trade openness is heterogeneous across different regions. The main research results show that technique spillover is an important way to achieve a win-win situation in emission reduction and trade openness.

This study aims to highlight the asymmetric impact of economic growth (GDP), trade openness (TO), energy consumption (EC), foreign direct investment (FDI), and financial development (FD) on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in Vietnam over the period 1990–2022, using quantile-on-quantile regression and Granger causality in quantiles techniques. Our mainstream findings indicate that the selected macroeconomic indicators have a strong positive effect on CO₂ emissions in this country, and this effect is more pronounced in the lowest and highest quantiles of the respective variables. In addition, the results of Granger causality suggest a bidirectional causal relationship between the examined indicators. These findings suggest that fostering economic growth, promoting trade openness, managing energy consumption, encouraging foreign direct investment, and enhancing financial development can contribute to a sustainable environment in Vietnam.

By reallocating resources among more or less polluting sectors, trade reforms affect pollution levels directly. They also affect pollution indirectly through their impact on economic activity and income levels, which then affect not only emissions, but also the demand for higher environmental standards. The sign of the direct and indirect effects is ambiguous. In other words, whether trade openness leads to more or less pollution is an empirical question. Using cointegration techniques, we disentangle the long- and short-run relationship between trade openness, income per capita and CO₂ emissions in Tunisia, as well as the extent of Granger causality among these variables. Results suggest that the direct effect of trade openness on CO₂ emissions is positive both in the short and the long run, but the indirect effect is negative at least in the long run. The overall effect is positive both in the short and long run, highlighting the importance for trade reforms to be accompanied by strong environmental policies.

Based on a proposed measure of tax reform in developing countries, this paper examines both how tax reform is influenced by development aid flows, and whether this effect depends on countries’ degree of openness to international trade. Tax reform involves here the change of the tax structure in favor of domestic tax revenue and at the expense of trade tax revenue. Empirical results based on 102 developing countries over the period 1980–2015 suggest that development aid exerts a positive effect on tax reform in developing countries, with relatively less advanced countries enjoying a higher positive effect than advanced developing countries. Additionally, recipient-countries’ degree of trade openness matters for the effect of development aid on tax reform.

This paper re-studies the relationship between trade openness and environmental pollution. Through the theoretical framework, there is a non-uniform effect of trade openness on environmental pollution. Utilizing four alternative measures of trade openness as threshold variables, this paper examines the effect of trade openness on environmental pollution. We adopt a regression with nonlinearity, in which our nonlinear model includes two regressions — a threshold model and an interaction-term model. Utilizing four alternative measures of trade openness, our threshold test shows a single-threshold effect on pollutant emissions, implying that there are two regimes: low- and high-corruption. Our empirical results show that for countries with high-corruption, increases in trade openness significantly reduce pollutants emissions whatever CO₂ emissions or SO₂ emissions, and the larger effects of trade openness on environmental quality. However, the impact of trade openness on pollution was not found in countries with low-corruption. This study suggests that further trade openness and reduced environmental degradation (i.e., decline in CO₂ and SO₂ emissions) are compatible rather than competing objectives, especially in high-corruption countries. Furthermore, our results also show that in low-corruption countries, the negative effects of income on CO₂ emissions are statistically significant, but in high-corruption countries it is not so.

A voluminous literature has been devoted to the effect of countries’ participation in international trade (for example through trade policy reforms and greater trade openness) on their poverty level, but not on the issue the other way around. The current analysis contributes to filling this gap in the literature by examining the effect of poverty on trade openness in a set of 99 developing countries over the period 1980–2014. Results suggest that while over the full sample poverty exerts a negative effect on trade openness, this effect ultimately depends on countries’ development levels, proxied by their real per capita income level. A rise in poverty levels reduces trade openness in relatively poor countries, but increases it in relatively advanced economies. These findings suggest that enhancing the ability of poor countries to participate in international trade would help promote greater trade openness, which could in turn help reduce poverty. The international community has a key role to play in that respect.

This study examines the complement of financial development, trade openness, political stability and integrating government expenditure on Egyptian economy using time series annual data covering the period 1977 until 2018. This study used the ARDL-ECM estimates to determine the long and short-run cointegration between the series. The estimated results indicated that the financial development enhances growth in the long-run, while the political stability undermined the economic growth in the long-run. Interestingly, we found financial development, trade openness and government expenditure Granger cause economic growth in the short-run, while political stability Granger causes economic growth in both short and long-run; and a similar result with the causal relationship appeared in the strong causal relationship condition. Overall, this study showed that both financial development and trade openness gave evidence of causing growth, but the political stability does not. Thus, the reform policies should continue, while adopting measures to ensure that all the determinants are complementing to growth in Egypt as they are all pivotal and it is imperative for policy analysts to put into perspective when formulating policies as the study captures a novel political stability variable towards growth.

This paper investigates the effect of poverty on services export concentration in developing countries. The analysis has used an unbalanced panel dataset of 95 developing countries over the period 1995–2014. Findings suggest that higher poverty rates induce greater services export concentration, and this effect translates through three channels, namely, human capital, trade openness, and export product concentration. Thus, if they were to diversify services export items, policymakers should implement policies (such as reducing services trade barriers and improving the business environment) that directly promote services export diversification, but also measures that directly target poor segments of the population.

Emerging nations focus more on new and innovative business activities across national borders for economic advancement. Further, trade openness has recently emerged in BRICS countries. Thus, global entrepreneurship development can be a great opportunity for the traded open countries. In line with this, the study aims to examine the impact of trade openness on global entrepreneurship development in BRICS countries. The study collected balanced-panel data from BRICS countries for 2001–2020 and applied random-effects estimation to analyze the data. The study drives a cross-sectional dependence test, unit root test, and model specification test before applying the estimated model. The study further checked the robustness of the findings by alternative estimation methods like FMOLS and DOLS and found similar results. The results revealed that trade openness positively influences global entrepreneurship development, but average tariffs can discourage entrepreneurs. Specifically, trade openness through trade spread, trade freedom, and average tariffs increase the total early-stage entrepreneurial activities and entrepreneurial intentions rate in BRICS countries. Through cross-country analysis, the study found that trade openness significantly enhances global entrepreneurship development in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa rather than in Russia. The study found similar results after checking the robustness of the findings by alternative estimation methods like FMOLS and DOLS. Thus, the findings could be a great insight for the policymakers of BRICS countries. Governments, academics, international entrepreneurs, etc., can use the findings in future decisions as a policy dialogue.

The study investigates the extent to which trade openness could determine consumption risk sharing. The findings from panel regressions on Sub-Saharan African countries suggest a significant contribution of trade integration in the allocation of consumption risk. Further results point to the importance of reducing corruption if countries are to unhinge domestic consumption from domestic production. Additionally, as countries achieve higher financial deepening, they could become independent from international financial reliance thereby enjoying less Consumption risk sharing. The study argues for policies to promote trade and fight corruption if the observed levels of risk sharing in Sub-Saharan Africa are to improve.