Toward the Fourth Industrial Revolution among E7 Economies: Assessment of the Combined Impact of Institutional Quality, Bank Funding, and Foreign Direct Investment.

Technological innovation and its paradigm, that is, the Fourth Industrial Revolution-4IR, have shown strong impact on income levels of adopters across the globe. To this end, this analysis examines the impact of bank funding and institutional quality on technological advancement. This study adds additional variables such as high-technology exports and foreign direct investment (FDI) as control variable. Our study period spans from 2000 to 2018 on an annual frequency for E7 economies (Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, India, Turkey, Russia, and China). This study leverages on cross-sectional ARDL, Augmented Mean Group (AMG), and Common Correlated Effects Mean Group Estimates (CCEMG) estimation techniques to examine long-run relationship between the outlined variables. Empirical findings show that institution quality, bank finance, income, high-technology exports, and foreign direct investments exert a positive effect on advancements in technology. Furthermore, the interaction between bank finance and institution quality on technological advancement is also positive and statistically significant. Based on the findings, it is concluded that large-scale funding is crucial for businesses to leverage revolutionary technology. Likewise, access to large capital sources if made easier encourages technology affordance as well as innovation and operational excellence. Thus, economies with established legal and financial systems stand to offer businesses such security, which encourages business innovation. Consequently, E7 economies ought to improve their financial and legal systems to boost financial security, creativity, and competitiveness of businesses.

Building Critical Infrastructures: Evaluating the Roles of Governance and Institutions in Infrastructural Developments in Sub-Sahara African Countries.

BACKGROUND: The Sub-Saharan African (SSA) region has notably been in the limelight of infrastructural deficit discussions over the decades. Although the region's infrastructural development is gradually improving, the levels and pace of development remain generally poor compared to the rest of the world. OBJECTIVES: This study thus aims to empirically examine the roles of governance and institutions in infrastructural developments in the Sub-Sahara African (SSA) region toward addressing the pressing needs for critical infrastructures for the region. RESEARCH DESIGNS: The empirical strategies utilized in the study include the Common Correlated Efficient Mean Group (CCEMG) and Dynamic CCEMG methods among others. These empirical approaches were applied to analyze data on governance and institutional quality proxies for the SSA region to achieve the study's objectives while controlling for the effects of industrial value-added, foreign capital inflow (FDI), and overall economic growth for the understudied period (1990-2019). RESULTS: The results reflect the essence of governance and institutional quality as these variables significantly boost infrastructural development in SSA. In addition, industrialization and growth also show a favorable impact on the development of infrastructure thus reflecting that the transition from agrarian to industrial economies occurs in parallel with infrastructure development in the SSA. However, FDI inflows were not found to be significantly instrumental to infrastructural development in the region. CONCLUSIONS: Hence, the SSA must strive to strengthen institutions and harmonize their industrial and economic push with infrastructural developments while encouraging potential foreign investors to diversify investments to infrastructural projects beyond the usual primary sector/resource-based activities.

How do trade and economic growth impact environmental degradation? New evidence and policy implications from the ARDL approach.

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.