This paper investigates the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, and output growth among African OPEC countries (Libya, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon) using the panel autoregressive distributed lag model (PARDL) estimated by means of mean group (MG) and pooled mean group (PMG) for the period 1970-2016. The paper estimated three panel models comprising the components of greenhouse gasses which includes nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane and examined their relationship with economic growth and energy consumption. The findings of the study showed evidence of a positive impact of economic growth on both CO2 and methane emissions in the long run. Its impact on nitrous oxide emissions although positive was found to be statistically insignificant. Energy consumption was also found to produce an insignificant positive impact on CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions in the long run. In the short run, economic growth exerts a significant positive effect on methane emissions; however, its effect on CO2 and nitrous oxide emissions although positive was found to be statistically insignificant. Energy consumption produces an insignificant impact on all components of greenhouse gasses in the short run. In addition, our empirical results showed the presence of a non-linear relationship between methane emissions and economic growth, confirming the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) only in the case of methane emissions model.

PurposeThis study examines the effect of public debt on the economic growth of OECD countries by disentangling the effect into permanent and transitory components. The study covers 37 OECD countries.Design/methodology/approachThe Mundlak decomposition was employed to decompose the effect of public debt into its transitory and permanent effect on economic growth. To account for potential endogeneity problem, the Hausman and Taylor estimator was employed to estimate the decomposed model. Further, the study disaggregated the OECD model into country group models for further analysis of the dynamics of the relationship between the variables.FindingsThe findings of the study reveal that in the full OECD model public debt exerts a significant negative permanent and positive transitory effect on economic growth. This was robust to alternative model specifications. The magnitude of the negative permanent effect of debt was found to be larger than the positive transitory effect. Further, the estimates of the disaggregated models reveal that though public debt has a negative permanent effect across all the country groups, it was not the case for the transitory effect of debt. Also, a net public debt model was estimated, and its effect on public debt was found to be largely insignificant, exhibiting a Ricardian-like behaviour.Originality/valueTo the best of our knowledge, this is the first study, particularly in the OECD context that employed the Mundlak transformation to examine the permanent versus transitory effect of public debt on economic growth.

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With the influx of labor migrants across the globe and developed countries being on the receiving end, countries like the Russian Federation have implemented strict migration policies to check the inflow of these migrants, mainly from low-income countries. However, with theoretical underpin the increase in labor migrants brings about competitiveness in the receiving countries labor market. The current study evaluates whether the Russian labor migration policy promotes competitiveness given the characteristics of labor migrants in Russia. The study carried out panel data analysis for 14 countries within Russian region and an aggregated data from the rest of the world using the non-stationary heterogeneous panel model and estimators of mean group and pooled mean group. The result first presents strong cointegration between wage levels and labor supply (immigrant, emigrants, and native workforce). The result then reveals a negative effect of immigrants inflow and native workforce on wage levels in the short run but a positive effect, in the long run, suggesting that the labor migrants inflow is imperfectly substitutable in the Russian labor market. The result also shows a positive effect of migration policy on wages both in the short and long run, indicating that the strict migration policy can hinder the competitiveness of the labor force in the labor market.