Natural resources rents and economic performance: Post-COVID-19 era for G7 countries.

COVID-19 affected the economies of both developed and developing countries through multiple channels. However, the impact of this pandemic was also not so different for the developed world too. This study aims to evaluate the effect of the natural resources' rents such as oil, natural gas and energy rents on the economic performance of G7 economies from 1990 to 2020. This study uses updated panel data methods to identify the effect of COVID-19 by using novel diagnostic and unit root methods. The study found that during the COVID-19 and post pandemic, economic performance has been declined. This study found that natural resources rent, including oil and gas, help to improve the economic performance. Further, structural break for the year 2019 caused by COVID-19 also slowed down the economic performance of G7 economies. This study suggests more stabilization policies towards natural resources commodity prices and encouragement of active role from the G7 countries. This study further provides relevant policy implications in the concluding section for the selected group of countries.

Controlling environmental pollution: dynamic role of fiscal decentralization in CO2 emission in Asian economies.

The "environment" has become one of the important and debatable topics of the world and policymakers identifying the new predictors of CO2 emissions. Therefore, some economies have been promoting fiscal decentralization to encourage environmental quality by granting more financial autonomy to provincial and sub-national governments. Therefore, this study evaluates the dynamic effect of fiscal decentralization on CO2 in selected nine Asian economies using a fresh dynamic panel ARDL model from 1984 to 2017. The empirical findings show that fiscal decentralization has asymmetric effects on CO2 emissions because a positive change in revenue and expenditure decentralization reduced CO2 emissions in Asia. Moreover, a negative change in expenditure decentralization has also enhanced CO2 emissions in the long run. Thus, clean environmental policies and recommendations can be revised and proposed based on nonlinear findings in the modern era.