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This paper explores the relationship between natural resources and economic growth of Brunei Darussalam, an underresearched area in the available literature.

Annual data are sourced from reliable sources for the period 1989–2020. Appropriate cointegration techniques for time series data are employed to estimate the specified models and extract results.

The results provide evidence about the positive and significant role that natural resources have played in the economic growth of Brunei Darussalam. Similarly, trade openness and domestic investment have also positively and significantly impacted the long-run economic growth. On the other hand, the impacts of government expenditure and the growth of human capital on economic growth are although positive but insignificant statistically in the long run. The short-run results show that natural resources, government expenditures and domestic investment have influenced economic growth both positively and significantly. Moreover, the positive and significant impact of trade openness on economic growth, which was observed in the long run, turned negative and insignificant in the short run. Finally, the insignificant positive relationship between the growth of human capital and economic growth observed in the long run remained the same in the short run.

This paper studies the resource curse hypothesis for Brunei Darussalam for the first time, and therefore, the findings will be of significant interest for policymakers and researchers.

Improving the quality of life of the masses is the prime objective of all policymakers of both developed and developing countries. However, the determinants of improved quality of life are not well explored in the empirical literature. This study has, therefore, tried to identify the determinants of quality of life by focusing on military expenditures.

Panel data from 1990 to 2017 are collected from internationally reliable sources for the Association of Southeast Asian Nation (ASEAN hereafter) member countries, and suitable econometric techniques are employed to estimate the designed models.

The results show that military expenditures have affected the quality of life of the ASEAN member countries both negatively and significantly. Similarly, the inflation rate has also negatively affected the quality of life. In terms of magnitude, the negative impact of the inflation rate on quality of life has exceeded than the impact of military expenditures. On the other hand, trade openness, per capita income, urbanization and government expenditures have played a positive and significant role in improving the quality of life in the ASEAN region. Moreover, it is found that the positive impact of per capita income on quality of life is highest among other determinants.

This study provided comprehensive evidence about the relationship between military expenditures and quality of life in the ASEAN context. Consequently, the ASEAN member economies will benefit a lot from the results of this study.

Environmental degradation is recognized as a serious problem globally, and hence, Saudi Arabia is no exception. This paper aims to focus on the economy of Saudi Arabia to identify the determinants of environmental degradation.

Time series data spanning from 1971 to 2014 is used and analyzed using the recently developed autoregressive distributed lag modeling approach.

The obtained results reflected that natural resources, per person income and urbanization, have impacted environmental degradation both positively and significantly in the long run. Similarly, an insignificant negative relationship is established between trade openness and environmental degradation. Moreover, energy consumption has positively but insignificantly affected environmental degradation. In the short run, only per capita income has positively influenced environmental degradation while the rest of the variables have lost either significance levels or their direction of relationship has reversed.

As this is a pioneering study on the economy of Saudi Arabia, therefore, the authors assume that policymakers will find the findings of the current study very useful while formulating and implementing policies to control environmental degradation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential impact of trade openness on economic growth for the economy of Brunei Darussalam.

Empirical analyses are conducted using the autoregressive distributed lagged model (ARDL) procedure and the data used were spanning from 1989 to 2018.

The obtained results indicated a positive and statistically significant relationship between trade openness and economic growth. Similarly, the results also revealed that domestic investment and natural resources positively impacted economic growth. Further, this paper found that human capital has impacted economic growth both negatively and significantly, which is against the prior expectation. Moreover, in the short-run, trade openness and domestic investment have lost its significance level while all other variables have maintained both their significance levels and signs of their coefficients.

This paper has provided comprehensive evidence regarding the relationship between trade openness and economic growth for Brunei Darussalam. Therefore, the policymakers of Brunei are suggested to take practical steps to gear up trade liberalization, and hence attain higher growth. Further, a favorable attention is also needed toward economic diversification and encouraging domestic investment to accelerate the long-run economic growth.

As this is a comprehensive study on the economy of Brunei Darussalam, therefore, this paper expects that the policymakers would find it useful while formulating and exercising suitable policies related to trade openness.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the contingency effect of natural resource abundance on the foreign direct investment (FDI)–growth relationship in a nonlinear (threshold) model.

The authors use the fixed effect threshold model for panel data with annual frequency for 83 countries and estimate threshold level of natural resource abundance that split the sample and change the FDI–growth relationship.

The results show that FDI has a strong positive impact on the economic growth of the host country if the host country's natural resources export is below the statistically significant estimated threshold. However, this FDI-induced economic growth is watered-down if the countries natural resources export is larger than the estimated threshold.

The results show that FDI has a strong positive impact on the economic growth of the host country if the host country's natural resources export is below the statistically significant estimated threshold. However, this FDI-induced economic growth is watered-down if the countries natural resources export is larger than the estimated threshold. The results are robust for alternative indicators of natural resources, i.e. natural resources rents.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the foreign direct investments (FDI)-growth nexus and the impact of natural resource abundance in the host country on the FDI-growth nexus.

For a large data set of 104 countries for the period 1996-2015, Arellano and Bond’s GMM estimation method is applied to investigate the impact of FDI inflow on economic growth and the role of the natural resource sector on the FDI-growth relationship.

The paper found a positive and significant effect of FDI inflows on economic growth of the host country. However, the impact of FDI inflows on economic growth changes with the changes in the size of the natural resource sector. The estimated positive impact of FDI inflows on economic growth declines with the expansion in the size of natural resources. Beyond a certain limit, a further expansion in the size of natural resource sector will lead to a negative effect of FDI on economic growth.

The paper found a positive and significant impact of FDI inflows on economic growth of the host country. However, the impact of FDI inflows on economic growth changes with the changes in the size of the natural resource sector. The estimated positive impact of FDI inflows on economic growth declines with the expansion in the size of the natural resources. Beyond a certain limit, a further expansion in the size of the natural resource sector will lead to a negative effect of FDI on economic growth. The same analysis is repeated for groups of countries divided into different income groups. FDI inflows are found to have significant growth enhancing role in all three groups of countries. However, FDI inflows-induced growth was found to be more pronounced in the middle- and low-income countries compared to high-income countries. Further, FDI-induced economic growth is slowed down in low-income and middle-income countries by the increase in size of the natural resource sector. While in high-income countries, the size of the natural resource sector has no significant role on the FDI-growth nexus.

While countries use their natural resource sector as an instrument to attract FDI into the countries, low- and middle-income countries face the dilemma of experiencing the resource curse in the form of watered down FDI-induced growth. Therefore, low- and middle-income countries need to try at the same time to attract FDI into the non-resources sector to keep the relative size of the natural resource sector low as to avoid hampering the FDI-induced economic growth. High-income countries, on the other hand, do not experience the FDI-induced growth hampering impact of the natural resource sector. Therefore, high-income countries should attract FDI into the countries regardless of the sector attracting the foreign investments.

The paper is part of the author’s PhD research and is an original contribution.

The new growth literature in general is very optimistic about the positive impact that human capital has on the economic growth of countries. Based on this argument, the current paper focusses to investigate the impact of different types of human capital on economic growth.

The paper utilizes data for the period 1998 to 2017 and employs suitable econometric techniques.

It is found that it is not the stock of human capital rather its utilization in terms of average working hours that matters for higher growth. Other than human capital, trade openness and investment are positively associated with growth. On the other hand, inflation has an insignificant impact while employment level has a negative impact on growth. Moreover, for developing countries, the study also revealed that stock of human capital has negatively and average working hours has positively impacted economic growth. Finally, domestic investment and employment level appeared to be the main growth determinants in developing countries.

Policymakers are suggested to ensure the maximum utilization of working hours, trade openness and domestic investment in improving economic growth in OECD countries.

This study has visualized the impact of human capital on economic growth from a new perspective and hence would be useful for policymakers.

The main aim of this study is to investigate the impact of climate change and water salinity on farmer’s income risk with future outlook mitigation. Salinity and climate change are a threat to agricultural productivity worldwide. However, the combined effects of climate change and salinity impacts on farmers' income are not well understood, particularly in developing countries.

The response-yield function and general maximum entropy methods were used to predict the impact of temperature, precipitation and salinity on crop yield. The target minimization of total absolute deviations (MOTAD)-positive mathematical programming model was used to simulate the impact of climate change and salinity on socioeconomic and environmental indicators. In the end, a multicriteria decision-making model was used, aiming at the selection of suitable climate scenarios.

The results revealed that precipitation shows a significantly decreasing trend, while temperature and groundwater salinity (EC) illustrate a significantly increasing trend. Climate change and EC negatively impact the farmer's income and water shadow prices. Maximum reduction in income and water shadow prices was observed for A2 scenario (−12.4% and 19.4%) during 2050. The environmental index was the most important, with priority of 43.4% compared to socioeconomic indicators. Subindex amount of water used was also significant in study area, with 28.1% priority. The technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution ranking system found that B1 was the best climatic scenario for adopting climate change adaptation in the research region.

In this study, farmers' income threats were assessed with the aspects of different climate scenario (A1, A1B and B1) over the horizons of 2030, 2040 and 2050 and three different indicators (economic, social and environmental) in Northwestern region of Pakistan. Only in arid and semiarid regions has climate change raised temperature and reduced rainfall, which are preliminary symptoms of growing salinity.

Wealth Management Products (WMPs) are the largest and most crucial component of China's Shadow banking, which are off the balance sheet and considered as a substitute for deposits. Commercial banks in China are involved in the issuance of WMPs mainly to; evade the regulatory restrictions, move non-performing loans away from the balance sheet, chase the profits and take advantage of yield spread (the difference between WMPs yield and deposit rate).

In this study, the authors investigate what bank related characteristics and needs; influenced and prompted the issuance of WMPs. By using a quarterly panel data from 2010 to 2019, this study performed the fixed effects approach favored by the Hausman specification test, and a feasible generalized least square (FGLS) estimation method is employed to deal with any issues of heteroscedasticity and auto-correlation.

This study found that there is a positive and significant association between the non-performing loan ratio and the issuance of WMPs. Moreover, profitability and spread were found to play an essential role in the issuance of WMPs. The findings of this study suggest that WMPs are issued for multi-purpose, and off the balance sheet status of these products makes them very lucrative for regulated Chinese commercial banks.

Non-guaranteed WMPs are considered as an item of shadow banking in China, as banks do not consolidate this type of WMPs into their balance sheet; due to that reason, there is no individual bank data available for the amount of WMPs. The authors use the number of WMPs issued by banks as a proxy for the bank's exposure to the WMPs business.

From a regulatory perspective, this study helps regulators to understand the risk associated with the issuance of WMPs; by providing empirical evidence that Chinese banks issue WMPs to hide the actual risk of non-performing loans, and this practice could mislead the regulators to evaluate the bank credit risk and loan quality. This study also identifies that Chinese banks issue WMPs for multi-purpose; this can help potential investors to understand the dynamics of WMPs issuance.

This research is innovative in its orientation because it is designed to investigate the less explored wealth management products (WMPs) issued by Chinese banks. This study's content includes not only innovation but also contributes to the existing literature on the shadow banking sector in terms of regulatory arbitrage. Moreover, the inclusion of FGLS estimation models, ten years of quarterly data, and the top 30 Chinese banks (covers 70% of the total Chinese commercial banking system's assets) make this research more comprehensive and significant.