Structural properties and evolution of global photovoltaic industry trade network.

As resource shortages and environmental problems keep coming up, economies urgently need renewable energies as the new driving force for development. As one of the representatives of renewable energy, the photovoltaic (PV)'s trade has received much attention from all walks of life. Based on bilateral PV trade data, complex network methods and exponential random graph models (ERGM), this paper constructs global PV trade networks (PVTNs) during 2000-2019, describes detailed evolution features and verifies the influencing factors of the PVTNs. We find that (1) PVTNs have obvious characteristics of the small-world network, accompanied by disassortativity and low reciprocity. (2) Asia, North America, and Europe are the top 3 leading regions in the PVTNs. (3) China is the largest exporter, and the US is the leading recipient. Germany is an essential importer as well as exporter of PVTNs. (4) The formation and evolution of the PVTNs are significantly affected by transitivity, reciprocity, and stability. PV trade is more possible when economy-pairs are WTO members, located on the same continent, or with asymmetrical urbanization rates, industrialization rates, technological level or environmental supervision strength. Specifically, economies with higher industrialization rates, technological levels, stricter environmental regulations or lower urbanization rates are more likely to import PV. Economies with higher economic development, larger area, and greater trade openness are more inclined to trade PV. Besides, economic partners that share a religion or language, have common historical colonial ties or geographic borders or sign regional trade agreements are more likely to trade PV.

Determinants of Vietnam's potential for agricultural export trade to Asia-Pacific economic cooperation (APEC) members.

This study examines determinants of Vietnamese agricultural exports to the APEC and whether there was an export gap between Vietnam and each APEC trading partner in the period 1998-2018, using the stochastic frontier gravity model. The empirical results affirm the consistency of the gravity model for Vietnamese agricultural exports. The new findings imply that the government should concentrate on designing a policy framework to encourage export enterprises to invest more in the technology factor, especially for large and high-demand markets such as the USA, Japan, and Korea. In practice, export enterprises should focus on several key action points. First, find partners to expand the distribution network of agricultural products within the four largest markets. Second, pay attention to updating information on the technical requirements of China, the largest import market. Third, conduct research to build up competitively strategic products that can be exported to potential new markets, such as Russia, Australia, and Malaysia.

"Does Institutional Quality, Natural Resources, Globalization, and Renewable Energy Contribute to Environmental Pollution in China? Role of Financialization".

Our study explores the impact of financialization on carbon emissions by utilizing diverse financialization proxies, particularly for China. We examine the impact of financialization, institutional quality, globalization, natural resources, trade openness, and renewable and nonrenewable energy consumption on environmental pollution over the period 1996-2017 by utilizing dynamic autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) simulations. The empirical findings of the study indicate that institutional quality, trade, globalization, natural resources, and renewable energy consumption significantly decrease environmental pollution in the long run, while foreign direct investment and financialization have neutral effects on carbon emissions. Our findings demonstrate that a 1% increase in institutional quality, trade, IFDI, renewable energy, and globalization leads to a decrease in CO2 emissions by 0.198, 0.016, 0.075, 0.010, and 0.072%, respectively. Even though financialization indexes contributed insignificantly to environmental degradation, other explanatory variables significantly affected carbon emissions through indirect effects of financialization. Financialization indexes behave in a similar context, and these proxy indicators are good parameters to understand the complex nature of financialization. Moreover, in order to achieve low carbon emissions and sustainable development, countries need viable financial institutions that focus on green growth by promoting clean production process strategies to ensure the reduction of CO2 emissions.

Asymmetric impacts of disaggregated energy consumption and oil price fluctuations on the MENA net oil-exporting and importing economies.

This paper asymmetrically analyzes the impact of energy consumption and oil price fluctuations on the economic growth of the MENA net oil-exporting and importing nations from 1990 to 2019 using panel nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (PNARDL) model developed by (Salisu and Isah, Econ Model 66:258-271, 2017). The findings revealed that for the net-oil exporting countries, the impact of nonrenewable energy on economic growth is nonlinear in both terms, where in the both terms, high consumption of nonrenewable energy is influencing economic growth and its low consumption is limiting it. Furthermore, the impact of renewable energy is linear and it is influencing and limiting economic growth in both terms respectively. Moreover, the impact of oil price fluctuations on economic growth is linear in the long run and nonlinear in the short run, where in the long run, increase in it is not influencing economic growth but in the short run, while its decrease has no effect. For the net-oil importing countries, the impact of nonrenewable energy on economic growth is nonlinear in both terms, where in the long run, high consumption of nonrenewable energy is influencing economic growth but in the short run, it is discouraging it; however, in both terms, low consumption of nonrenewable energy has no effect. In addition, in the long run, the impact of renewable energy is nonlinear but linear in the short run; however, none of its impacts is significant in both terms. Also, the impact of oil price fluctuations on economic growth is linear in both terms and in the both terms, it is influencing economic growth. Nonetheless, for all the variables, the impacts are higher in the net-oil exporting countries. Policy recommendations were provided.

On the relationship between pollution reduction and export product quality: Evidence from Chinese firms.

Chinese government adopted a new environmental program during "Eleventh Five-Year Plan" period. Whether this program can achieve its goal of pollution reduction and quality improvement for exports is of vital importance for China's sustainable development. This paper constructs a quasi-difference-in-difference (DID) framework to identify the effects of the new environmental policy on export product quality by using highly disaggregated trade transaction data at the product level. Empirical results show that the implementation of pollution reduction targets is negatively correlated with export product quality. This negative impact is more profound in western regions, capital-intensive industries, privately owned firms and firms exporting to countries which are not members of Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development group. In addition, our extended analysis shows that the negative effects can be mitigated through product switching within the firms. The major policy implication is that local governments should take proper measures to strengthen the effects of innovation offsets caused by environmental regulation and effectively utilize the induced effects of environmental regulation on product switching. The goal is to achieve a win-win outcome for environmental protection and improvement in export product quality.

A trade-related CO2 emissions and its composition: Evidence from China.

Trade-related CO2 emissions has been widely studied in existing research and them have mainly calculated the CO2 emissions embodied in overall trade; however, China's domestic value chain (DVC) has developed rapidly, and different regions have different emissions effects due to different trade patterns. This study divides Chinese interregional trade into four trade patterns from the perspective of domestic production fragmentation. Then we develop a decomposition model of the interregional trade-related CO2 emissions and pollution heaven hypothesis (PHH) of different trade patterns based on China's interregional input-output table for 2002 to 2010. Finally, we explore the influencing factors of the changes of environmental effects using structural decomposition analysis method. The results show that from 2002 to 2010, the volume of CO2 emissions embodied in interregional trade increased significantly with the share of CO2 emissions induced by traditional trade in intermediate products always representing a major proportion but which still underwent a downward trend. Interregional trade activities increase China's CO2 emissions, and the PHH holds at the national level. Among them, trade in final products is conducive to reducing national CO2 emissions while the other three patterns of interregional trade are opposite. In particular, the balance of avoided CO2 emissions (BAC) in trade related to the DVC is positive, meaning that the DVC is polluting. In addition, domestic trade activities of the central region, northwestern region, and northern coast are not conducive to reducing regional and national CO2 emissions while the southern coast and northeastern region are opposite.

Community Evolution in International Migration Top1 Networks.

Focusing on each country's topmost destination/origin migration relation with other countries, this study builds top1 destination networks and top1 origin networks in order to understand their skeletal construction and community dynamics. Each top1 network covers approximately 50% of the complete migrant network stock for each decade between 1960 and 2000. We investigate the community structure by implementing the Girvan-Newman algorithm and compare the number of components and communities to illustrate their differences. We find that (i) both top1 networks (origin and destination) exhibited communities with a clear structure and a surprising evolution, although 80% edges persist between each decade; (ii) top1 destination networks focused on developed countries exhibiting shorter paths and preferring more advance countries, while top1 origin networks focused both on developed as well as more substantial developing nations that presented a longer path and more stable groups; (iii) only few countries have a decisive influence on community evolution of both top1 networks. USA took the leading position as a destination country in top1 destination networks, while China and India were the main Asian emigration countries in top1 origin networks; European countries and the Russian Federation played an important role in both.