Mushtaq Ahmad Malik

The present study attempts to investigate the impact of various socio-economic determinants on poverty incidence in the context of post-Soviet Central Asian countries—Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan—during the 1991 to 2022 time period. The feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) method is used to estimate the influence of various explanatory variables on the incidence of poverty. The study found that poverty in Central Asia is significantly influenced by economic growth, income inequality, unemployment, and health outcomes such as infant mortality rate. While economic growth helps to reduce poverty, its benefits are conditional on equitable distribution of income. The findings of the present study highlight the need for robust social protection systems and investments in the healthcare system. Policies targeting labor market outcomes, income distribution, and health infrastructure are essential for poverty eradication. Though education and trade openness show less direct impact, they remain important for long-term sustainable development of the Central Asian region. The study offers several policy recommendations to address the incidence of poverty across the region.

Purpose: Tourism–economy relationship in India has been studied extensively in the past literature using a single equation approach. However, the present paper diverted from this trend and examined the tourism–economy relationship using the specific to general modelling approach over the 1990–2018 time period. The study also accounts for the influence of merchandise trade, capital formation, foreign investment inflows and inflation on economic growth to achieve the robustness of the coefficient estimates.Design/methodology/approach: To achieve the objective, the study utilised a specific to general modelling strategy. First, the regression equation includes only three core variables: gross domestic product (GDP), international tourist receipts and international tourist expenditures. Next, the authors include other control variables in the regression equation one by one, leading us to test five model types for investigating the cointegration among the variables. As for the estimation technique, the authors employed autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach.Findings: The paper's findings highlight that tourism receipts and expenditures exert a positively significant impact on economic growth. Moreover, including the additional independent variables does not substantially change the tourism and economic growth relationship. The existence of one-way causality from tourism expenditures to economic growth supports the tourism-led growth hypothesis. These findings highlight the rationale for intervention by the government and policymakers to promote tourism potential and facilities to accelerate the overall growth performance of the country. While the existence of one-way causal effect from economic growth to tourism revenues supports the growth-led tourism development hypothesis, implying that economic expansion is necessary for tourism development.Research limitations/implications: This research article tried to present a comprehensive picture of India's tourism–economy relationship. However, the present study is organised as an aggregate economy-level analysis. It assumed that the aggregate tourism sector is homogenous. However, different tourism sectors exert different levels of influence on the economy. The authors expect future research can take the disaggregated analysis of the tourism–economy relationship.Practical implications: This study provides valuable insights into the tourism-led growth hypothesis in India. The study highlights comprehensive intervention by the government and policymakers for accelerating tourism development to invigorate the overall growth performance of the country over the long run. The principal recommendation emerging from the present research is that the tourism growth potential can be depended upon to stimulate the economic performance of the Indian economy.Originality/value: The present study diverted from the previous empirical studies by following a specific to general modelling strategy. First, the regression model includes only three core variables such as economic growth, tourism receipts and tourism expenditure. Next, the authors include other control variables in the regression equation one by one, leading us to test five model types for investigating the cointegrating relationship among the variables. GDP growth rate is used as a dependent variable in all five specifications. The idea is to expand the model to capture every feature of the data generating process.

Over the years, emerging economies have extensively followed a liberal trade regime and witnessed unprecedented economic growth. At the same time, global uncertainty has also reached to the pinnacle and has gripped almost every country within its ambit. Trade openness though seems to be channelising negative spillover effects of global uncertainty, yet continues to flourish. Therefore, the economic implications of uncertainty in presence of unprecedented trade openness remain a moot question which lays the basis of this study. Using autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) approach, the empirical estimates suggest that macroeconomic effects of uncertainty are effectively mitigated by trade openness. JEL Codes: C22, F14, C22

The present study aims to examine the output and total factor productivity (TFP) growth by estimating a stochastic frontier production function for a panel of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries, and to decompose TFP growth into technical change, technical efficiency, and scale efficiency. The empirical findings reveal that, while factor accumulation is the main driver of output growth in the MENA region, TFP growth is increasingly accounting for a respectable proportion of output growth, with improved technical efficiency playing a crucial role in productivity growth. Specifically, the average annual TFP growth is found to be 0.846%, with positive contributions from technical efficiency and scale efficiency. However, the results show that technical progress has had a negative impact on TFP growth. The positive growth in technical efficiency suggests that the countries are catching up towards the optimal production frontier. At a disaggregated level, oil-rich countries registered negative effects of technical progress, while non-oil countries registered negative effects of scale efficiency. Technical efficiency, however, accounts for the largest positive factor in TFP growth in both oil and non-oil country groups.

The present research article uses simultaneous equation modelling approach to investigate the three-way linkages between economic growth, energy consumption, and environmental quality in Turkey for the 1970 to 2014 period. Further, the study uses physical capital stock, labour force, manufacturing value added, trade openness, credit to private sector, and urbanisation as control variables. The paper employs generalised method of moments (GMM) technique that ensures consistent and efficient estimates of the long-run relationship. The econometric approach controls for nonstationarity, endogeneity, cross-error correlation, and heteroscedasticity problems. Further, robustness of the results is checked by using three-stage least squares (3SLS) estimator. The statistical results of the paper support the existence of bidirectional causality between energy consumption and economic growth, CO₂ emissions and economic growth, and CO₂ emissions and energy consumption. Moreover, the results indicate existence of a monotonically increasing relationship between CO₂ emissions and economic growth implying non-existence of Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis in Turkey during the sample period. The findings of the present study are of particular interest to policymakers as they help pursue economic policies to achieve sustainable development.

The link between trade and sustainable development has been largely analyzed on a piecemeal basis. A comprehensive study simultaneously examining economic, social and environmental aspects of sustainable development is needed to ensure coherence between the competing results of previous studies. This study aims to examine the relevance of trade openness in defining sustainable development, with special focus on five emerging countries known as BRICS, using the dynamic panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach. The results indicate that economic growth has a tendency to enhance sustainability in both the long and short run. However, trade openness, energy consumption and foreign direct investment are extremely detrimental for sustainable development.