Ecological footprints and sustainable environmental management: A critical view of China's economy.

Global economies have recently been concerned about sustainable environmental management by reducing emissions and tackling ecological footprints. The rapid economic expansion and investment in traditional manufacturing further raises environmental degradation. China surpasses other emerging economies in the economic growth race yet has remained the top pollution-emitting economy for the last few decades, necessitating scholarly attention. This study examines the influencing factors of ecological footprints in China from the perspective of COP27. Using the extended dataset from 1988 to 2021, this study uses several time series diagnostic tests and verifies the existence of the long-run association between the study variables. Consequently, the non-linear scattered data leads to non-parametric (method of moment quantile regression) adoption. The empirical results indicate that only economic growth is a significant factor in environmental quality degradation in China. However, improving renewable energy usage, research and development, and foreign direct investment reduces the country's ecological footprint. Hence, the latter variables substantially lead to environmental sustainability. The robustness of the results is confirmed via a robust non-parametric estimator and causality test. Based on the empirical results, this study recommends increased investment in research and development, renewable production, and foreign direct investment enhancement.

Modeling the time-varying effects of oil rent on manufacturing: implications from structural changes using Markov-switching model.

Previous "oil curse" studies primarily estimate a single, linear effect of oil rents on income using time-invariant parameters over entire sample periods. This means the true effects of oil dependence cannot be captured if structural changes are taking place, or effects are non-linear. We introduce a two regime Markov-switching model into the resource effects literature to assess the time-varying effects of oil rent dependence on the Malaysian manufacturing sector. We also allow for non-linear threshold effects. We find the impact of oil rents is regime-dependent. Under a rarer "first regime" structure, there is no significant effect. Under a predominant "second regime," there is an inverted U-shaped effect, with oil rents' share of GDP up to 8% positively associated with manufacturing, and negatively associated beyond this. We find connections between regime changes and the 1997 Asian financial crisis and 2008 global financial crisis. Implications for effective diversification policies are discussed.

The impact of fiscal decentralization, green energy, and economic policy uncertainty on sustainable environment: a new perspective from ecological footprint in five OECD countries.

The paper explores the short-run and long-run asymmetric impact of fiscal decentralization, green energy, and economic policy uncertainty on environmental sustainability proxied by ecological footprint. Using the Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed lag (NARDL) approach in selected five OECD countries, we find that ecological footprint responds to positive and negative fiscal decentralization asymmetrically in the long run and short run. However, the nature of the response varies significantly across countries. The result also suggests that green energy is a major factor in reducing the ecological footprint in all countries except Canada. Finally, economic policy uncertainty plays a negative and significant role in the ecological footprint in the UK, USA, and Germany while insignificant in Australia and Canada. Implications for effective environmental policies are discussed.