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The Sub-Saharan Africa region is disproportionately affected by energy poverty and is considered highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Therefore, addressing the pressing challenges of energy poverty and promoting environmental sustainability in this region is of paramount importance. Consequently, this study appraises the relationship between energy poverty and ecological preservation in Sub-Saharan Africa from 2005 to 2020, using government effectiveness and regulatory quality as moderating variables. A combination of energy poverty indicators and an index of energy poverty computed via the principal component analysis method were applied to identify the link between energy poverty and ecological sustainability. The instrumental variable generalized method of moment technique was applied to address the likelihood of endogeneity issues, and the Driscoll-Kraay approach was employed to check the consistency of the instrumental variable generalized method of moment method. Key findings indicate that energy poverty expands the ecological footprint in Sub-Saharan Africa, leading to ecological deterioration, while the interaction with government effectiveness and regulatory quality further deteriorates the environment. Subsequently, the study provides several recommendations to mitigate the influence of energy poverty on the environment., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

This research investigates the potential influence of extreme exchange rate asymmetry on export commerce using the instance of leading oil and non-oil exporting African economies, namely Nigeria, Ghana, Congo, Gabon, Algeria, and Morocco, within the context of MANTARDL. In addition, the analysis disentangled the positive (appreciation) and negative (depreciation) components of the exchange rate to explore if exchange rate considerations show a differential effect on the export trade. The findings for the six countries are different depending on whether the currency rate is flexible, fixed, or managed. According to MATNARDL's results, an inverted J-curve may be seen in both Nigeria and Ghana. As an additional note, (minor, moderate and major) asymmetries in exchange rate modeling nexus in oil-exporting countries in the African continent should not be neglected. Acceptable policy suggestions are provided in the main text of the work., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interests, (© 2023 Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

At the heart of the EU cohesion policy and the European Green deal lies the underlying sub-goals not limited to; financing the transition, promoting economic well-being of regions, take everyone along, achieving climate neutrality and a zero pollution Europe which the small and medium enterprises positions as the perfect conduit to achieve the aforementioned sub-goals in the case of Europe. Our study seeks to investigate if credit flowing from private sector units and government-owned enterprises to SMEs guarantees inclusive growth and environmental sustainability in EU-27 member states using data collected from OECD Stat. Database and the World Bank database from 2006 to 2019. Findings from the econometric analysis shows that SMEs activities is a significant and positive predictor of environmental pollution in the EU. In the case of inclusive growth countries cohort in the EU, both credit flowing from private sector funding institutions and government-owned enterprises to SMEs enhances a positive SME growth impact on environmental sustainability. In the case of non-inclusive growth countries cohort in the EU, credit flowing from private sector to SMEs enhances the positive impact of SME growth on environmental sustainability while credit flowing from government-owned enterprises to SMEs intensify the negative impact of SME growth on environmental sustainability., Competing Interests: The author declares no competing interests., (©2023PublishedbyElsevierLtd.)

In order to shed empirical light on the impact of the multi-dimensional decomposition of financial development indicators on renewable energy usage, this study investigates the threshold effect of political conflict on finance-energy dynamics in Africa. The research output relies on a panel of 46 African nations from 2010 to 2020, using IV-GMM estimators that are robust to cross-sectional dependence and allow for heterogeneous slope coefficients. The results of direct, indirect, and threshold equations show that i.) Financial development indicators spur renewable energy consumption, while political conflict drags it. ii.) There is a threshold at which financial development could spur renewable energy in some regions of Africa, and the tendency of financial development to maintain such capacity is conditioned on the accessibility of financial facilities and political conflict/stability within a specific range of threshold values. iii.) the threshold level assessment shows that 11 countries in the panel, including Botswana, Mauritius, Cape Verde, Namibia, Seychelles, Zambia, Sao Tome and Principe, Gabon, Ghana and Benin Rep., are above the threshold level of political conflict in Africa. From a policy angle, driving up renewable energy consumption in Africa requires the government to provide enabling safety net environment for the diversification of finance options targeting innovative shifts away from traditional energy sources to the expansion of alternative renewable energy ventures., Competing Interests: The authors declare no conflict of interest., (© 2023 The Authors.)

The age-long debate between SME-growth nexus has ignored environmental sustainability, as evident by many previous empirical studies. However, the pivotal role of SMEs and their undeniable dominance in the business landscape of Africa presents itself as a potential instrument for leading sustainability advocacy on the African continent. The study investigates whether credit flows from the private sector and government-owned enterprises to small and medium enterprises guarantee growth and environmental sustainability using data from World Bank Databases for 35 African countries from 2006 to 2019. Results from the econometric analysis show that domestic credit flowing from the private sector and government-owned enterprises to SMEs leads to significant growth with greater impact at lower quantiles in the case of Africa. On the issue of environmental sanctity, credit flowing from the private sector to SMEs counteract the adverse effect of SMEs activities on the environment, while credit flowing from government enterprises intensify the negative effect of SMEs activities on the environment in the case of Africa. Furthermore, renewable energy significantly reduces environmental decay more efficiently in upper quantiles while natural resource rents aggravate environmental decay only for African countries in the lower quantiles. Policy recommendations are proffered in the manuscript within the ambit of the study findings., (© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

The increasing human activities amidst competition for resources across the globe has made environmental challenges an ongoing classic problem, thus prompting policymakers to continually seek effective solution while ensuring sustainable development. With the wide coverage of the relevance of the double dividend hypothesis in explaining the co-benefit of environmental tax, there is a dearth of evidence in the literature to suggest that environmental tax offers green dividends for both the environment and agricultural practice in the European countries. As such, this study employed the more recent Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) alongside other approaches for Europe's largest agrarian economies (France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) over the annual period 1995-2020. The investigation affirms the validity of the co-benefit of environmental tax as far as environmental sustainability and value-added to agriculture are concerned in this panel of 'Big Four' economies, thus motivating the countries to relentlessly pursue the carbon-neutral 2050 target. Moreover, the study aligns with the expectation that renewable energy utilization and population density are desirable factors for achieving a carbon-neutral target. Lastly, the findings suggest that environmental quality is attainable in the panel, especially as increasing income surpasses a certain threshold, thus validating the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. Above all, the findings provide timely policy insight that accommodates both the environmental sustainability and food security framework of the European Union. The policy options relevant in light of the study's conclusions include that the decision makers in the selected agrarian economies should ramp up energy transition opportunities through a resilient environmental tax system that incentives availability of credit and investment financing in the agriculture sector., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

This study investigates the role of institutional structure on asymmetries dynamic impact of financial integration, capital market development on economic performance in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The study classified economic performance into RGDPC, nominal gdp and human capital development, and employed (PNARDL) modeling framework, and a panel of 16 nations of SSA over the period 1996-2019. The finding of this research output can be summarize as thus: i.) In the long run, a rise in positive shock to the financial integration index leads to a rise in RGDPC, while a negative shock to FI leads to a fall in RGDPC. ii.) Both shocks (positive and negative) to MCAP reduce RGDPC. Institutional quality index (INSQI) is revealed to have a positive and significant impact on RGDPC in the long run and indeed intensify their asymmetries. iii.) Both shocks to FI exert inverse influence on nominal GDPC, while positive and negative shocks to MCAP exert a positive and negative influence on GDPC, respectively. INSQI also affects GDPC negatively and significantly and indeed reduces their asymmetries. iv.) Positive and negative shocks to FI reduce HCD as well as shocks to MCAP. INSQI, on the other hand, adds to HCD and intensifies their asymmetries. However, the lack of consistency in the results across the models suggest that the interplay between these variables are still undeveloped relative to other continents of the world, and the benefits are yet to be adequately harnessed., (© 2023 The Authors.)

Based on the commitment to improve environmental quality across European Union under the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals and varying national goals, this study investigates the dynamic linkages between bureaucracy, socioeconomic factors, conventional fossil fuel energy consumption vis-à-vis aggregate fossil and disaggregate fossil (oil, coal, and gas) fuels and environmental quality in the panel of selected 25-EU nations for the period 1990-2017. The study employs relevant second-generation empirical method and unearth the following results: (1) inverted environmental Kuznets curve was validated while fossil fuel consumption has a deteriorating impact on environmental performance due to its positive effect on carbon emission; (2) fossil fuel energy consumption (both aggregate and it components) exerts a dampening impact on environmental performance due to its positive effect on carbon emission; (3) that direct effect of bureaucracy and socioeconomic factors promote environmental quality but the degree or magnitude of influence is significantly different between bureaucratic system and socioeconomic factor, and (4) the moderating or indirect impact of bureaucracy, socioeconomic on the environment via fossil fuel energy consumption is observed and significantly different across the model specification. Moreover, the result reveals a unidirectional causal relationship flows from GDP per capita, bureaucracy and socioeconomic factors to carbon emission, while bi-directional relationships between oil, gas and carbon emission are established. In policy direction, the study therefore recommend that the European Union member countries should further explore the opportunities in clean energy development in order to ameliorate the continent's environmental concerns. Furthermore, in the quest to scale up the bloc's energy transition, significant improvement in the countries' bureaucracy establishment and socioeconomic conditions could hasten the energy transition and efficiency policy while improving the environmental sustainability drive., (Copyright © 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.. All rights reserved.)

This study is hinged on analyzing factors such as agriculture and globalization (de jure trade and financial) that threaten a sustainable environment using two proxies of ecological footprint: carbon and noncarbon ecological footprint in the Philippines while controlling for the influence of fossil to GDP, economic growth, urban population, and financial development using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework. The result provides evidence of long-run stable state among the variables. The result validates inverted U-shaped pattern of EKC involving relationship between agricultural development and ecological footprint for the Philippines indicating that initially, ecological footprint increases as the agriculture develops and then declines as the agriculture matures to generate efficiency and low carbon. In addition, this study explores elasticities of the variables using ARDL, FMOLS, DOLS, and CCR procedure and found that de jure financial globalization exerts positive influence on ecological footprint in the long run. De jure trade globalization is found to be negative and significant in the long run. It is also found that agricultural level operates below the threshold level required to maximize the growth benefits of agricultural system towards mitigating environmental sustainability. Further empirical result shows a positive relationship between economic growth, fossil fuel, urban-population growth, and ecological footprint, and negative insignificant relationship between credit to private sector and ecological footprint. The government should optimize the use of agricultural land through well-articulated economic integration strategy fashioned to pave way for cleaner and low-carbon technologies sources like solar, geothermal, biomass, biogas, tidal power, photovoltaic, and wind energy in the agricultural production to avoid further deterioration of the environment., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Sub-Saharan Africa's regulatory environment ranks amongst the least business friendly in the world. The difficulty of starting and operating businesses and the high tax burden are amongst the major conditions that make the regulatory environment hostile. This study examines how these business regulatory conditions explain the growing challenges in mitigating CO 2 emissions in the sub-region. For this purpose, data from 1997 to 2018 are used to analyse an extended environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) equation for thirty (30) Sub-Saharan African countries. The results of the Method of Moments Quantile Regression analysis show that the inverted U-shaped curve of the EKC hypothesis is statistically not valid across the entire quantile distributions. The impact of increasing tax burden on CO 2 emissions is positive and increases across the entire quantile distributions. Business regulatory efficiency has a negative (i.e. decreasing) impact on CO 2 emissions across the entire quantile distributions and shows a stronger impact in countries at the upper quantiles, such as in South Africa, Botswana, Gabon, and Nigeria. Conclusively, policy choices that seek to reduce tax burden on households and firms and foster greater economic freedom for businesses are needed to break the growing trend in Sub-Saharan Africa's CO 2 emissions., (© 2022. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Inspired by the commitment to address the environmental challenges in Peru under the UN Sustainable Development Goals 13 (Climate Action) and its implications by 2030, therefore, this study investigates the combined role of economic globalization, financial development, and fossil fuel intensity consumption using a combination of dynamic ARDL counterfactual simulation and kernel-based regularized least squares within the context of Stochastic Impact by Regression on Population, Affluence and Technology over the period 1971-2017. This research output confirms the inverted-U-shaped hypothesis between economic growth and carbon emissions. In contrast, the kernel-based regularized least squares confirms the scale effect and fossil curse hypothesis in the relationship between financial development and carbon emission, and heterogeneous effects in economic integration and carbon emission. We further document that financial development, fossil fuel consumption, urban population, affluence (economic growth), and government final consumption expenditure spur environmental pollution while economic integration reduces it. This study recommends Peru to instill environmental justice through regulations and policies restricting inflows into an exploration of environmentally unsustainable projects within Peruvian metropolises or in the Peruvian Amazon. There is a need to revisit finance and investment laws and increase investment in low-carbon infrastructure within Peru., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

The interconnection between environmental protection and sustainable development is at the heart of discussion among all the intergovernmental agencies around the globe. Such discussion is considered highly important considering the role of finance, an abundance of fossil fuel and industrial value-added on economic activities and environmental issues. Meanwhile, few empirical studies in this line of discussions have documented policy options for projecting the path towards sustainable development in Argentina from 1971 to 2018. To contribute to the extant literature in filling this gap, this study examines whether finance can escalate a long-lasting economic shift that will change the path of carbon emission in Argentina using the novel econometric technique, dynamic Autoregressive Distributed Lag simulations. The modelling protocol incorporates the impact of the following economic agents such as population, economic growth, trade openness, and government consumption expenditure. Our result suggests that all the variables are cointegrated under the ARDL-bounds testing framework. The long and short-term estimates from the dynamic ARDL simulation show that finance and industrial value added interestingly offer policy options for CO2 mitigation in Argentina. Fossil fuel, population, economic growth, and government consumption expenditure have increasing an impact on CO2 emissions, exacerbating sustainability challenges in Argentina. In sum, improved finance and industrial restructuring are needed economic acumen that can accelerate a quick transition to a low-carbon development in Argentina, while fossil fuel, population, economic growth, and government consumption expenditure generate environmental challenges. Policy options in consideration of investors' safety in carbonated companies in Argentina, these companies owe shareholders an obligation to invest in a resilient carbon capture and storage technology in a bid to decrease environmental degradation and align with environmental goals set by the Argentine government., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)