Is electronic finance sustainable or not in the European Union? New insights from the panel vector autoregression approach.

Today, as a result of the developments and widespread use of information and communication technologies, the weight of online shopping in the economy has increased. The environmental impacts of this new order, which is an important part of electronic finance, are discussed. In this study, the effect of electronic finance, economic growth, renewable energy consumption, and urbanization on emissions in EU member countries is examined using the panel vector autoregression (PVAR) approach for the period from 2005 to 2018. The main results suggest that e-finance has a positive and statistically significant effect on CO2 emissions. However, the renewable energy consumption-increasing effect of e-finance is greater than its emission-reducing effect. Moreover, renewable energy consumption has a statistically insignificant effect on emissions. Therefore, the contribution of e-finance on environmental quality weakens. The requirement for EU member countries to prioritize the use of environmentally friendly energy to benefit from the environmental contribution of e-finance in the most optimal way is stated as the main policy implication of this study.

The link between urbanization and air pollution in Turkey: evidence from dynamic autoregressive distributed lag simulations.

This study investigates the relationship between urbanization and air pollution in Turkey. Dynamic ARDL method was used for the period 1960-2015. According to the findings, there is a positive and statistically significant relationship between long-term urbanization and CO2. If urbanization increased by 1%, carbon emissions increased by 0.02%. There is a similar relationship between the shocks that will occur in population growth and CO2 emission in the long term. However, there is a negative and statistically insignificant relationship between the two variables. In the relationship between GDP and CO2, there is a positive relationship in the long term. GDP increase of 1% increases CO2 emissions by 0.11%. There is a similar relationship between long-term GDP shocks and CO2 emissions. According to short-term analysis results, energy consumption increases CO2 emissions by the same rate as GDP. However, the astonishing result of the study emerges here. Empirical results show that a long-term positive shock in energy consumption reduces CO2 emissions and a negative shock increases pollution. According to these results, Turkey has not reached the point of sustainable growth. For this reason, this developing country needs to make regulatory implementations and determine future policies for these impacts affecting air pollution.

The impact of natural resources and gross capital formation on economic growth in the context of globalization: evidence from developing countries on the continent of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the nexus between natural resources, gross capital formation, globalization, and economic growth in the developing countries from European, Asian, African, and American continents. It adopted the panel vector autoregression (PVAR) approach to test this relationship for the period from 1980 to 2018. Results suggest that natural resources and globalization have a positive impact on economic growth in European, Asian, and American countries, while capital formation negatively affects growth. In African countries, the effect of globalization and gross capital formation is positive, but natural resources have a negative impact on GDP. Evidence from all continents illustrate that there is bidirectional causality between globalization and economic growth. Also, there is bidirectional causality detected between capital formation and growth in Europe and Asia and between natural resources and growth in Asia and America, while there is unidirectional causality from GDP to natural resources in Europe, from capital formation to GDP in Africa and America, from GDP to natural resources in Europe, and from natural resources to GDP in America. Based on these results, it can be said that new growth models can no longer be independent of natural resource rents and globalization.

The nexus between economic growth, tourism development, energy consumption, and CO2 emissions in Mediterranean countries.

This study aims to analyze the relationship among international tourism, energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and economic growth in Mediterranean countries for the 1995-2014 data period. According to the results of panel quantile regression model for 17 countries, the tourism-led growth hypothesis is valid in low growth levels, but deviations from this hypothesis are determined after the middle growth level. Also, the CO2 coefficient at low growth levels indicated that sustainable growth is achieved, but no significant results are obtained at subsequent growth levels. Finally, energy consumption supports economic growth at low and medium growth levels. Short-run causality test results illustrated that there is bidirectional causality between GDP and all explanatory variables.

The effect of information and communication technologies and total factor productivity on CO2 emissions in top 10 emerging market economies.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the nexus among information and communication technologies (ICT), total factor productivity (TFP), and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in the top 10 emerging market economies for the period from 1995 to 2014 using the panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) approach. Analysis results suggest that the internet usage and fixed telephone subscriptions have a positive impact on environmental pollution, although mobile cellular subscriptions and TFP have a negative impact on carbon emissions. According to causality test results, there is bidirectional causality between CO2 and all independent variables. Consequently, the results justified the use of TFP instead of GDP as an indicator of the economic development and the importance of ICT in environmental problems since ICT has proven to be undeniable in environmental policies. Thus, possible policies prioritize environmental sustainability in the digitalization of the economy, which ensures both a pollution-reducing effect and an increase in TFP.

Revisiting the nexus among carbon emissions, energy consumption and total factor productivity in African countries: new evidence from nonparametric quantile causality approach.

This study aims to contribute to the existing thin body of nonlinear causality literature by applying the new hybrid nonparametric quantile causality approach. In this line, we investigate the non-linear nexus among total factor productivity, energy consumption and carbon emissions for seventeen African countries. From the results, it is remarkable that there are generally strong causalities between the variables in the middle lower, middle upper and middle quantiles. Hence, energy consumption, environmental pollution and total factor productivity are closely linked in African countries. In particular, bidirectional linkage is detected between total factor productivity and energy consumption for Angola, Benin, Botswana, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Morocco, Egypt, Nigeria and Tunisia. Studying the relationship between total factor productivity and emissions again at the middle quantile bidirectional causal ordering is documented almost for all the countries. Lastly and regarding the linkage between energy consumption and carbon emissions, a strong bidirectional ordering between the two variables is confirmed for Angola, Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Cameroon, Kenya, Morocco, Egypt, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal and Tunisia. We can notice that an increase in economic development is critical for these countries; a number of regulatory policies for environmental problems and energy consumption are required during this development.