Abstract: This article explores the intricate relationship between environmental degradation, specifically air pollution, and economic growth in the Sultanate of Oman spanning the period from 1990 to 2022. We employ cointegration and vector error correction models to uncover both short- and long-term dynamics in the association between air pollution and economic growth. Fur-thermore, Granger causality analysis is utilized to investigate the causal links between these crucial variables. This data encompasses factors related to environmental quality and various control variables. The empirical results unveil a sustained long-term cointegration connection between the variables. Additionally, our findings highlight a statistically significant positive impact of economic growth and energy consumption on CO2 emissions. Furthermore, the short-term analysis reveals an annual adjustment of approximately 14.1% in N2O emissions dis-equilibrium. The Granger causality study indicates unidirectional causal relationships involving N2O emissions, economic growth, and CO2 emissions. The implications of these findings for Oman's policy landscape are substantial. To effectively reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it is imperative for Oman to establish robust climate change policies. Additionally, the government can play a pivotal role in encouraging and endorsing the use of renewable energy sources, such as green hydrogen, as a promising alternative to traditional oil and gas resources.

The main aim of this article is to examine the inter-relationships among the top cryptocurrencies on the crypto stock market in the presence and absence of the COVID-19 pandemic. The nine chosen cryptocurrencies are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, Litecoin, Eos, BitcoinCash, Binance, Stellar, and Tron and their daily closing price data are captured from coinmarketcap over the period from 9/13/2017 to 9/21/2020. To determine the order of integration, the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF), Phillips-Perron (PP), and Kwiatkowski, Phillips, Schmidt, and Shin (KPSS) unit root tests were carried out, and all of the cryptocurrencies were found to be integrated of order 1 i.e. I(1). It has been found that there is strong evidence of a long-run relationship between Bitcoin and altcoins irrespective of whether it is pre-pandemic or pandemic period. Hence these cryptocurrencies' prices and their inter-relationship are resilient to the pandemic.

This paper provides estimates of the elasticity of substitution between operational and managerial jobs in the US economy covering a period of almost five decades, derived from an aggregate CES production function. Estimating the long-term relationship between (the log of) the aggregate employment/self-employment ratio and (the log of) the returns from paid-employment relative to self-employment and testing for structural breaks, we report different estimates of the elasticity of substitution in each of the two regimes identified. Our results help to understand and interpret one of the most intriguing aspects in the evolution of self-employment rates in developed countries: the reversal of the trend in self-employment rates. Our estimates show that a higher level of development is associated with a greater number of entrepreneurs and smaller firms. Some rationales for understanding the growth of the elasticity between paid-employment and self-employment, including the recent trends in the digital economy—are also suggested.

This paper deals with the analysis of the temperatures in a group of 36 African countries. By looking at the maximum, minimum and the range (the difference between the maximum and the minimum) and using a long memory model based on fractional integration and cointegration, we first show that all series display a long memory pattern, with a significant positive time trend in 29 countries for the maximum temperatures and in 33 for the minimum ones. Looking at the range, the estimated value for the order of integration is smaller than the one based on maximum or minimum temperatures in 17 countries. Performing fractional cointegration tests between the maximum and minimum temperatures, our results indicate that the two series cointegrate in the classical sense (i.e., with a short memory equilibrium relationship) in a group of 11 countries, and there is another group of eight countries displaying cointegration in a fractional sense. The remaining 17 countries with no evidence of cointegration are therefore at the very high risk of climate change due to the absence of long-term comovement in their maximum and minimum temperatures. Findings in this paper are of tremendous interpretations and relevance for the analysis and climate projections in Africa.

In this paper, the validity of the Wagner’s law is investigated in tenth selected Sub- Saharan African countries, namely Botswana, Equatorial Guinea, Mauritania, Nigeria, South Africa, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Madagascar, and DR Congo. Five variants of the Wagner’s law were tested for the period 2005-2014, using panel econometric approaches encompassing cointegration and causality. The study found a long run relationship between the public expenditure and the various explanatory variables used as proxies of income. The long-run causality tests indicate that there is bidirectional causality between expenditure and income in all models with the exemption of the Gupta model. It is concluded that for Sub-Saharan Africa, both the Wagner’s law the Keynesian hypothesis tend to be valid under the period of investigation. The explanation is that there has been the tendency for public expenditure to grow relative to national income (Wagner’s law) and that public expenditure is a policy instrument (an exogenous factor) for improving national income (Keynesian hypothesis) during the 10-year period.

Asymptotic theories for fractional cointegrations have been extensively studied in the context of time series data, with numerous empirical studies and tests developed. However, most of the previously developed testing procedures for fractional cointegration were primarily designed for time series data. This paper proposes a generalized residual-based test for fractionally cointegrated panels with fixed effects. The test development is based on bivariate panel series with the regressor assumed to be fixed across cross-sectional units. The proposed test procedure accommodates any integration order between [0,1], and it is asymptotically normal under the null hypothesis. Monte Carlo experiments demonstrate that the test exhibits better size and power compared to a similar residual-based test across varying sample sizes.

: There remains no acquiescence that confirms the extent to which unemployment and entrepreneurship influence each other in developing countries. Thus, an incessant invite for further debate attracted the need to assess the relationship between unemployment and entrepreneurship in terms of business formation in Namibia Given that, this study examines the relationship between unemployment and entrepreneurial activities in Namibia. Time series data were collected from the World Bank database to investigate the relationship between unemployment and entrepreneurship in Namibia. Unit root test was conducted using both the Augmented Dickey-Fuller test and the Phillips-Perron test to measure stationarity of the data and found all the variables to have no unit root after the first difference. Thus, we employed the Johansen-Juselius test of cointegration, and the results revealed the absence of a long-run relationship between the variables. Hence, we performed a vector autoregressive (VAR) model to estimate the short-run relationships and found that Namibia exhibit both the refugee and Schumpeter effects. Finally, the direction of causality between the variables was measured using the Pairwise Granger causality test and the results revealed that none of the variables was proven to granger cause the other, concluding that they are all independent of each other. Therefore, in pursuit of unemployment mitigation, we recommend policymakers to focus on other aspects beyond entrepreneurship when devising policies without jeopardizing the ease of business start-up procedures. This will incentivize entrepreneurial activities, which can eventually address other macroeconomic issues beyond unemployment.

A wide range of research has been developed in the empirical literature regarding income and price elasticities of health care expenditure (HCE). The results are mixed, as researchers employ different methodologies and data sources. The benefits of the panel data method, such as greater data variation, less collinearity, and more degrees of freedom, made it attractive among economists. However, the pooled mean group (PMG) method provides robust estimates compared to conventional methods, such as the mean group estimator and dynamic fixed-effects estimator. As such, this paper applies the PMG method to scrutinize the effect of income and price on U.S. health care consumption using a panel of 46 states. The income and price elasticities were found to be 0.85 and -0.48, respectively, which partially describes the recessionary decline in health care consumption following the Great Recession. In addition, the model reveals that the short-run income elasticity is smaller than the long-run. This confirms that U.S. health care consumption follows the permanent income hypothesis. Consequently, the short-run efficacy of public policies targeting HCE remains limited. The results of this paper suggest reconsidering and adjusting health care policies during a recession so as to avoid probable long-run adverse effects on HCE.

Does the choice of proxy for stock market development matter? This paper suggests that the growth effect of stock market development is sensitive to the choice of proxy and using alternative financial development indicators have practically no influence on the results. We found that using either the stock market capitalization to GDP ratio or the stock market returns; have a positive and significant effect on growth. However, we cannot make same conclusion when one uses either the ratio of total value of trades on the major stock exchanges to GDP or stock market turnover ratio to proxy for stock market development as the coefficient on these variables were found to be statistically insignificant. The indexes extracted from principal component analysis confirm the sensitivity of the effect to the choice of proxy. This finding suggest that stock market development is a conceptual terms, thus, representing it with single indicators make it impossible to identify which stock market development indicators have a significant positive growth effects.

In this short note, the described step-by-step derivations of the industrial energy demand function from the production function framework and provided researchers with two specifications. Then we applied these theoretical specifications to the time series data as empirical analysis. We concluded that theories should be considered at the beginning of the empirical analyses but the data also should be allowed to speak freely. Hence, the main suggestion of this short note is that it would be a better strategy to consider the combination of theory-driven and data-driven approaches in the empirical analyses.

The present reality of the Nigerian economy is the fact that inflation has remained unabated in spite of all exchange rate measures that have been adopted by the monetary authority. This calls for investigation into the extent to which exchange rate impact on inflation in Nigeria. The research paper examined the impact of exchange rate depreciation on inflation in Nigeria for the period 1981–2017, using Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Bounds Test Cointegration Procedure. The research shows that inflation rate in Nigeria is highly susceptible to lagged inflation rate, exchange rate, lagged exchange rate, lagged broad money, and lagged gross domestic product at 5% level of significance. A long run relationship was also found to exist between inflation rate, gross domestic product and general government expenditure, indicating that the model has a self-adjusting mechanism for correcting any deviation of the variables from equilibrium. Therefore, this study concludes that exchange rate is an important tool to manage inflation in the country; thus, this paper recommends that policies that have direct influence on inflation as well as exchange rate policies that would checkmate inflation movement in the country, should be used by the Central Bank of Nigeria. Also, monetary growth and import management policies should be put in place to encourage domestic production of export commodities, which are currently short-supplied. In addition, policy makers should not rely on this instrument totally to control inflation, but should use it as a complement to other macro-economic policies.

Uncertain price movement in staple food commodities puts agrarian economies at risk if not monitored and managed consistently. Hence, an attempt has been made to analyze the price behavior and integration across major wholesale and retail markets for rice and wheat in India. Monthly data (July 2000 to June 2022) on prices viz., wholesale and retail were sourced from the Food and Agriculture Organization and analyzed using growth rate, instability index, seasonal price index, Johansen’s test on cointegration, Granger causality test, and impulse response function. Findings indicated strong evidence of price dynamics in the selected markets in terms of spatial and temporal variation, clear-cut seasonality linking to production, and price divergence between wholesale and retail markets. Johansen’s test indicated a strong integration between wholesale and retail markets exhibiting unidirectional-, bidirectional- and no-causality. Impulse response analysis revealed that the selected wheat and rice markets are efficient in terms of ‘price discovery’ which takes place initially in the wholesale market, and then transmitted to the retail market. The study advocates decision-making information to the producers, traders, and consumers who have a potential interest in getting advantage of the price movement. It is concluded that strengthening market intelligence and reducing the distortion in markets will improve the existing overall performance.