• Energy Research
• 2021-2025close
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Abstract This study investigates the macroeconomic effects of adverse oil price shocks on a small oil-exporting economy — the Azerbaijan economy. We estimate a recursive (near) VAR model by using monthly macroeconomic data from 2006 to 2018. The results indicate the Azerbaijan economy is adversely influenced by an oil price decline. Specifically, we find that a negative oil price shock deteriorates trade balance, causes a currency depreciation, increases inflation and falls economic activity. Furthermore, our findings imply that the oil price-led devaluation shapes the inflationary and recessionary consequences of this shock.

Abstract The Chinese government has taken measures to realize energy-savings and emission reductions, such as promoting innovations, adjusting the industrial structure, balancing regional development, and reforming markets. The aim of this paper is to assess the effects of these measures on China's CO2 emissions by using a newly proposed decomposition approach, which identified eight new factors related to the above realistic measures, i.e., energy saving and production technologies, industrial energy and production efficiencies, regional energy and production efficiencies, and pure energy and production efficiencies. The main findings indicate benefits from considerable technological progress in energy-saving and production during 2000–2016 period, and two technological factors contributed the most to emissions abatement and cumulatively reduced 5372.43 Mt and 1291.72 Mt CO2 emissions. The efforts of industrial restructuring promoted energy and production efficiency improvement, which further facilitated emission reduction. In contrast, the pure energy and production efficiency changes cumulatively led to 1080.26 Mt and 1135.85 Mt CO2 emissions growth during the whole sample period, suggesting that severe resource misallocation problems may exist in both the energy market and output market. Additionally, the Chinese government failed to narrow the technology gap between developed regions and underdeveloped regions, further restricting emission reduction.

AbstractRemittances to the Philippines constitute a prominent part of its economy. However, remittances' effects on its environment have not been researched. In this regard, this research examines the direct and indirect impacts of remittance inflows on the Philippines' environmental sustainability for the 1977–2016 period by proposing a multivariate model, and by utilising the augmented ARDL and VECM methods to estimate this model. Our findings indicate that remittance inflows threaten environmental sustainability in the long‐run both directly and indirectly through boosting income and energy (oil) consumption. The results additionally imply that income and energy consumption also increase the ecological footprint of the Philippines in the long‐run. However, economic globalisation's long‐run impact is insignificant, yet its short‐run impact is significantly negative on the country's level of environmental degradation. Additionally, the findings reveal that the feedback hypothesis is valid between income and energy consumption in the long‐run, but the neutrality hypothesis is valid in the short‐run. This research's findings reveal that remittance inflows' impact on the environment is significant, and can occur through direct and various indirect channels, therefore, these inflows should be an integral part of sustainability policies in the Philippines, as ignoring them could cause further environmental decline.

We researched China's climate and sustainable development goal with relevant and susceptible instruments capable of inducing and mitigating carbon emissions. Amidst the contributor to the global carbon emissions, China is caught in between mitigating its carbon emission and aiming towards placing its national contribution of emissions to the acceptable levels of 1.5 °C and below 2 °C. Following the intricacies surrounding China's sustainable development as it contains its economic and environmental performance, we adopt China's data of 1980 and 2018 with different scientific approaches (nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL), dynamic ordinary least square test, and bootstrap Granger causality) with different instruments (such as economic growth, financial development, renewable energy, and innovation policies) to research China's sustainable development. For clear exposition and insight into our findings with policies attached, we draw a conclusion from the outcomes of the mentioned approaches. From NARDL and dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS), we find that economic growth through economic activities is statistically significant in determining the trend (increase) of carbon emissions in China in both periods (short run and long run). However, other selected instruments (financial, renewable, and innovation policies) tend towards controlling and moderating the carbon emissions in China. Thus, China has good prospects to mitigate its carbon emissions if considered tailoring its policies towards favorable instruments. From bootstrap Granger causality, we find similar inferential results that support previous findings thereby confirming the positive implication of the selected instruments to China's sustainable development. Hence, the nexus that is established among the selected instruments clearly show the importance of technological innovation and renewable energy in mitigating carbon emissions.

There are papers on association about natural resources, economic expansion, and their effect on the quality of the environment in Central Asia. However, no study has investigated the effect of human capital in this nexus concerning the Central Asian states. Thus this study investigates the link between natural resources, economic expansion, human capital, and CO2 in Central Asian states by employing Pooled Mean Group (PMG) and the Dumitrescu and Hurlin (DH) causality tests from 1995 to 2018. The outcomes from the PMG model showed that human capital has an opposite and significant association with CO2 in the short and long run. Therefore, it is stated that local human capital with higher environmental awareness through education and training makes a positive impact on environmental quality. With the growth of the natural resources index and expansion of the economy, Central Asian emissions will rise. With a positive and substantial coefficient of the natural resources, the finding suggests that, even though Central Asian states have plenty of natural resources, they are unable to exploit them efficiently to reap good rent advantages to reduce the emissions. The outcomes of the causality test stated that the index of natural resources, economic expansion, and human capital have one-way causality with emissions. The important policies and recommendations for maintaining the economic and environmental sustainability of this country are provided at the end of this paper.

Much of New South Wales and southern Queensland suffered from extreme drought from 2017 to 2019. This study models drought and bushfires impacts using VU‐TERM, a multi‐regional, dynamic CGE model. Prolonged drought pushed national real GDP to 0.7 per cent or more below base in 2018–2019 and 2019–2020. NSW’s real GDP fell relative to forecast by 1.1 per cent or $6.9 billion in 2018–2019 and 1.6 per cent or $10.2 billion in 2019–2020. These impacts reflect a severe diminution of farm output, given that agriculture accounts for around 1.6 per cent of NSW’s income. Bushfires exacerbated 2019–2020 losses. We assume that there is a full recovery in seasonal conditions in 2020. However, prolonged drought and bushfire destruction deplete farm capital through depressed investment and diminished herd numbers. Consequently, the income earning capacity of farms in recovery remains below that of a no drought base. The net present value of the national welfare loss is $63 billion, split between $53 billion in losses from drought and $10 billion from bushfires. The latter excludes any valuation of human lives lost, flora, fauna or forestry destruction. In the longer term, adaptation and policy responses will need to reflect the expectation of increased frequency of adverse climatic events.

Due to various environmental degradation and natural resource depletion around the world, researchers' and policymakers' attention has turned to what causes environmental degradation. The pursuit of a healthy environment has become a global challenge, a problem that affects more than one nation. Climate change is causing severe weather conditions in every world, disrupting economies and affecting the lives of many people. Hence, the study analyzes how trade and economic growth impact environmental degradation in Belgium, the USA, and Canada using panel data from 1995 to 2016. The study utilized the autoregressive distributed lag approach to provide new evidence and policy implications. The outcome confirmed the presence of cointegration among the selected variables. However, it was observed that economic growth decreases environmental degradation in the long run while trade openness shows a positively insignificant relationship with carbon emission. Nevertheless, a positive short-run relationship was observed between economic growth and carbon emissions whereas a negatively insignificant relationship was observed for trade and carbon emission. The findings prompted policy implications that more trading could be done between the countries. When countries trade more, their economies will flourish, ensuring global prosperity and minimizing environmental degradation.

AbstractEmbedding sustainability in day‐to‐day operations necessitates employees' proactiveness beyond compliance with standardised management practices. Exchanging information on safety and environmental issues is acknowledged as a component of workers' proactive behaviours for sustainability embeddedness, which is hardly promoted by codified procedures. Accordingly, identifying leverages to stimulate information exchange is a primary objective for academics and practitioners. The study investigates drivers of information exchange on safety and environmental near misses by examining five situation‐related antecedents: rewards/reinforcements, organisational boundaries, social proactiveness, stakeholder salience and connectedness. The study relies on a mixed method approach, by combining social network analysis and a questionnaire survey conducted among four large Italian companies. The findings partially support the hypothesis of the study, highlighting rewards/reinforcements and connectedness as relevant antecedents of information exchange, while organisational boundaries only partially relate with information exchange. Surprisingly, stakeholder salience and social proactiveness do not emerge as significant drivers of information exchange. The study contributes to the debate on extra‐role pro‐sustainability behaviours and provides implications for managerial practice.

Developing a low-carbon economy is the only way for countries to achieve sustainable development. Carbon emission reduction policies and low-carbon technology (LCT) innovation play key roles in developing low-carbon economy. Under government reward and punishment regulations, based on the bilateral matching and evolutionary theories, this paper constructs an evolution model consisting of a manufacturer investing LCT and a supplier offering LCT to analyze multi-phase LCT investment strategies. Firstly, the profit optimization model of a green supply chain is constructed from the perspectives of centralized-matching (CM), decentralized-matching (DM), and mismatching (MM), and the spatial information internal evolution law of multi-phase LCT investment is described by the Markov chain. Then, a bilateral matching algorithm is proposed to solve the equilibrium solutions, and the evolution process of the three modes is analyzed by numerical simulation. Finally, based on the product green degree, we analyze the impact of subsidies and taxes on investment-production decisions. Analytical results show that the matching mechanism proposed in this paper can help supply chain firms to obtain stable matching and has a significant effect on the realization of "triple wins" of society, economy, and environment. The investment utility of CM is higher than that of DM and MM. Manufacturers are inclined to adopt LCT, and the investment level tends to be stable over time. Government reward and punishment regulations are helpful to motivate supply chain firms to invest in LCT, and the synergistic effect of subsidies and taxes is better than that of a single policy.