Assessing environmental sustainability in top Middle East travel destinations: insights on the multifaceted roles of air transport amidst other energy indicators.

The Middle Eastern region is well-known for its flourishing tourism industry as the aviation sector contributes over US$213 billion to the regional GDP while air transport-related activities account for over 3.3 million jobs. Howbeit, the environmental impacts of this flourishing industry remain questionable. Hence, this study examines the tourism-emissions nexus in the Middle Eastern region from the perspective of air transportation while underscoring the multifaceted roles of major indicators like globalization, income, and energy use in the region. The empirical analysis of data spanning from 1975 to 2018 was conducted with advanced panel data analytical approach using the CS-ARDL technique. The sample selection was guided by available statistics on international tourist arrivals from the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO 2020), with a focus on the case of the five leading travel destinations in the region including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Oman, and Qatar. The robustness of the evaluated outputs was checked after which result-based policy suggestions were enunciated for authorities and other regional stakeholders. The analysis indicated that air transportation although boosting tourism has constituted significant detrimental environmental impacts on the reviewed destinations with an estimated long-run elasticity of ∼1.03. Additionally, while the trio of globalization, energy utilization, and income expansion exacerbate environmental degradation, the lowest carbon-triggering magnitude was observed from the regional income expansion. Thus, while the aviation sector facilitates the growing quest to diversify from a primary sector-based economy (mainly resources exploitation) to other prospective service industries like tourism, the study posits the need for authorities to put measures in place to address the environmental side effect of air transportation.

Do demographic factors affect the environment? Empirical evidence from the Middle East and North African countries.

Every country intends to enhance national production by achieving sustainable development. The purpose of this study is to examine whether there exists any long-run association among environmental deterioration measured by territorial emissions in CO2, demographic factors (total population, population density, and urban population) and some other variables, namely, energy use, per capita income, energy intensity, and industrial value added for the 16 countries from the Middle East and North African (MENA) over 1990-2018. We implemented the generalized method of moments (GMM), fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS), robust least square estimators, and panel Granger causality techniques for estimation. The empirical estimates reveal that there exists a long run cointegration among the series. Results also exhibit that energy use, per capita income, energy intensity, industrial value added, population density, total population, and urban population have positive effects on CO2 emissions. Furthermore, in each panel, there is bi-directional causality between population density and CO2 emissions, total population and CO2 emissions, and urban population and CO2 emissions. These findings suggest that the policymakers need not exclusively to focus on the transformation of rural labor from an agricultural-based model to urban regions with powerful, dominant industry and services sectors but also related to the changing of rural establishments into urban spaces is required. These changes in demographics involve changes in the demand for additional transportation services, food, shelter, clothing, and other necessities.

The impacts of resource abundance and export diversity on financial development in the South Asian economic bloc.

One of the most essential aspects of a nation's economic progress that determines the citizens' lifestyles and general wellbeing is the level of financial development (FD). Thus, the current study examines the influence of natural resources as key variable for financial development in South Asian economic bloc while accounting for the roles of export diversity, inflation, and economic expansion. The dataset utilized for the South Asian bloc stretches between 1990 and 2020. Second-generation panel econometric approaches that are robust to slope heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence were employed in the study. The relevance and applicability of the second-generation techniques was reinforced by some preliminary assessments while the cointegration checks confirm the existence of long-run interconnectedness between financial development and the regressors. The elaborate empirical analysis that was conducted shows that export diversity and natural resources abundance exert diametric impacts on financial development of the South Asian bloc. While the former positively influences financial development, the latter's impact was significantly negative thereby signaling the resource curse tendency of the South Asian countries. Furthermore, the observed roles of economic progress and inflation on the bloc's financial development were positive and significant. Therefore, authorities in the South Asian countries need to maintain greater regulatory oversight of the resources market to ensure that rent seeking and resource abuse are avoided at all costs towards building a more prudent fiscal mechanism within a stable financial system. Authorities also need to ensure that resources are fully efficiently utilized by channeling them to production activities that create value addition to resources to harness greater exports for improved FD levels. Other policy measures were also highlighted for the South Asian stakeholders in the main text.

Criticality of geothermal and coal energy consumption toward carbon neutrality: evidence from newly industrialized countries.

This study examines the long-term effects of coal and geothermal consumption on carbon emission while controlling for globalization and economic growth toward carbon neutrality in newly industrialized countries, including Brazil, China, India, Mexico, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, Indonesia, and Thailand for the period of 1990-2008. We compare the resulting relationships from various estimation techniques, such as fixed-effect ordinary least squares, dynamic ordinary least squares, fully modified ordinary least squares, and method of moment quantile regression. Overall, this study determines that the consumption of coal and geothermal energy is a significant determinant with a causal effect on carbon emission. The rise in coal energy consumption significantly increases carbon emission across all quantiles (0.1-0.90), whereas the rise in geothermal energy consumption reduces it across all quantiles (0.1-0.90). This relationship is also consistent across all quantiles (0.1-0.9). Policy suggestions are proposed on the basis of these findings.

The financial development-environmental degradation nexus in the United Arab Emirates: the importance of growth, globalization and structural breaks.

This article revisits the nexus between financial development and environmental degradation by incorporating economic growth, electricity consumption and economic globalization in the CO2 emissions function for the period 1975QI-2014QIV in the United Arab Emirates. We apply structural break and cointegration tests to examine unit root and cointegration between the variables. Further, the article also uses the Toda-Yamamoto causality test to investigate the causal relationship between the variables and tests the linkages of the robustness of causality by following the innovative accounting approach. Our empirical analysis shows cointegration between the series. Financial development increases CO2 emissions. Economic growth is positively linked with environmental degradation. Electricity consumption improves environmental quality. Economic globalization affects CO2 emissions negatively. The relationship between financial development and CO2 emissions is U-shaped and inverted N-shaped. Further, financial development leads to environmental degradation, and environmental degradation in turn leads to financial development in the Granger sense.

What matters for environmental quality in the Next Eleven Countries: economic growth or income inequality?

This study uses panel data for the period 1971-2013 to explore the implications of growth, wealth disparities, and per capita energy consumption on carbon emissions in a sample of Next Eleven (N-11) countries. It uses the first-generation (Pedroni and Kao) and second-generation (Westerlund) cointegration techniques to highlight a long-run interplay between the selected variables in carbon emission functions for all the N-11 countries. It also analyzes the long-run interactions among the series. Contrastingly, it also shows that economic growth, income inequalities, and per capita energy consumption accelerate CO2 emissions. Besides examining the effects of wealth disparity square, the study also uses the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis in the context of the N-11 countries and discusses the policy implications of its findings.