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As the world began to witness an unprecedented rate of environmental destruction, economists and international institutions have been toiling away for decades, making every effort to dissect the dynamics of the relationship between the environment and the economy. Many claims have preached that there is a trade-off between environmental wellbeing and economic prosperity, where economic growth would be hindered by environmental protection. As we continue to neglect nature, will the world be capable of maintaining infinitely growing economies without falling into a deficit of natural resources? The foundation of all forms of economic growth springs from nature. Therefore, this study aims to explore the true impact of environmental protection policies on economic performance, and claims that well-designated environmental policies would only strengthen economies.

This study aims to investigate the impact of environmental protection policies on gross domestic product (GDP) growth utilizing a selected sample of 18 OECD countries. Fixed effects panel regression was conducted for the sample from 1998 to 2015.

Findings suggest that an increase in the environmental protection stringency is associated with an increase in GDP in the long-run. Whereas in the short run, more stringent environmental policies have been shown to have a questionable impact on GDP, brought to light by the mixed results portrayed in the short-run data.

While it is true that this study has utilized data from the The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the findings could be applicable to countries of the MENA region. This is due to the fact that GDP levels of OECD countries and Middle East and North African (MENA) countries have been converging over the past few decades. The convergence suggests that both regions seem to be following similar trends since the year 1990, with an increasing similarity in trend over the years.

This paper empirically proves that the protection of nature is necessary for the sustenance of long-term economic growth. This study also provides an approximate time range of when the economic gains of environmental protection would be realized, specifically in the beginning of a green growth transition. This makes the study findings accurately relevant to Arab countries, where providing a time range is necessary to alleviate some the uncertainty of policymakers in the MENA region towards environmental policies.

The impact of Islamic finance on economic growth is an ongoing debate. The purpose of this study is to empirically evaluate how the development of Islamic finance affects the long- and short-run economic growth of Pakistan.

The institutional variables, Islamic banking development (IBD), Islamic bond market development (IBM) and Islamic stock market development (ISM), are considered as measures of Islamic financial development, and real gross domestic product (GDP) is taken as measurement proxy of economic growth. The quarter time series data from Q1:2006 to Q4:2021 is analyzed through Autoregressive distributed lag model, Bounds test, ECM and Pairwise granger causality test.

The findings of this study indicate that in the long run, there is a significant and positive correlation between IBD and ISM with the real GDP, though ISM negatively cointegrated with real GDP in the short run. In contrast, IBM and real GDP did not find cointegrated in the long run, though the relationship is significant but negative in the short run.

The findings highlight Islamic financial development in Pakistan can contribute to the country's economic development, and this can be achieved by improving the infrastructure, increasing skilled professionals, creating a favorable legal environment and ensuring financial sector stability. Investors can diversify their investments and mitigate risk by adding Islamic financial instruments to their portfolios.

This pioneering study simultaneously measures the cause and effect relationship between Islamic financial development indicators (Islamic banking, Islamic bond and Islamic stock) and economic growth in Pakistan.

The objective of this paper is to examine the effect of spending one extra year in high school on early marriage and childbirth.

The study takes advantage of the education reform in 2007 that extended the years of high school education by one to conduct a quasi experiment. The marriage and fertility outcomes of women who completed a four-year senior high school education are compared to those who completed a three-year senior high school education.

The findings from the study indicate that the one-year extension in high school education led to a 4.75 percentage point reduction in the probability of ever marrying by age 27 and a 6.7 percentage point reduction in the probability of ever given birth. The authors demonstrate that the extension of the duration of high school education by one year has a heterogeneous effect, as it reduced the fertility and marriage outcomes of rural girls more than urban girls. The study reveals opportunity costs and confinement effects as possible mechanisms through which the policy affected early marriage and birth.

This study is one of the few studies that examine the impact of the duration of secondary school education on fertility and marriage. For Africa in particular, there is no such study. Thus, this study provides a unique contribution to the literature since available studies on this subject matter can only be found in advanced economies. Unlike other studies in Africa that use a design that provides the combined effect of duration of schooling and school enrolment on fertility and marriage, this design enables the authors to only look at the effect of duration of schooling on fertility and marriage.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-04-2023-0323

Digitalization, innovation and changing customer requirements drive the continuous improvement of an organization's business processes. IT demand management (ITDM) as a methodology supports the holistic governance of IT and the corresponding business process change (BPC), by allocating resources to meet a company's requirements and strategic objectives. As ITDM decision-makers are not fully aware of how the as-is business processes operate and interact, making informed decisions that positively impact the to-be process is a key challenge.

In this paper, the authors address this challenge by developing a novel approach that integrates process mining and ITDM. To this end, the authors conduct an action research study where the researchers participated in the design, creation and evaluation of the approach. The proposed approach is illustrated using two sample demands of an insurance claims process. These demands are used to construct the artefact in multiple research circles and to validate the approach in practice. The authors applied learning and reflection methods for incrementally adjusting this study’s approach.

The study shows that the utilization of process mining activities during process changes on an operational level contributes to (1) increasing accuracy and efficiency of ITDM; (2) timely identification of potential risks and dependencies and (3) support of testing and acceptance of IT demands.

The implementation of this study’s approach improved ITDM practice. It appropriately addressed the information needs of decision-makers and unveiled the effects and consequences of process changes. Furthermore, providing a clearer picture of the process dependencies clarified the responsibilities and the interfaces at the intra- and inter-process level.

This study employs Stein Rokkan's methodological approach to analyse state formation in the Greater Middle East. It develops a conceptual framework distinguishing colonial, populist and democratic pacts, suitable for analysis of state formation and nation-building through to the present period. The framework relies on historical institutionalism. The methodology, however, is Rokkan's. The initial conceptual analysis also specifies differences between European and the Middle Eastern state formation processes. It is followed by a brief and selective discussion of historical preconditions. Next, the method of plotting singular cases into conceptual-typological maps is applied to 20 cases in the Greater Middle East (including Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey). For reasons of space, the empirical analysis is limited to the colonial period (1870s to the end of World War 1). Three typologies are combined into one conceptual-typological map of this period. The vertical left-hand axis provides a composite typology that clarifies cultural-territorial preconditions. The horizontal axis specifies transformations of the region's agrarian class structures since the mid-19th century reforms. The right-hand vertical axis provides a four-layered typology of processes of external intervention. A final section presents selected comparative case reconstructions. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first time such a Rokkan-style conceptual-typological map has been constructed for a non-European region.

The main objective of the quantitative study is to ascertain the relationship between the circular economy (CE) and carbon emissions. And also, the study examines the threshold beyond which the quality of governance reduces carbon emissions.

The autoregressive distributed lag approach is employed for the econometrics analysis. The study employed quarterly data from 2006Q1 to 2017Q4 on Ghana.

The results indicated that, although the CE had a positive and significant effect on carbon emissions, the moderating term had an adverse and significant effect on carbon emissions. This result suggests that to mitigate carbon emissions, a robust and efficient quality of institutions should be sustained. Finally, the study also identified a quality of governance threshold of 1.155 beyond which a shift to a CE would result in a reduction in carbon emissions.

The study recommends that policymakers should initiate policies that would enhance quality governance.

The main contributions of the study are that the paper ascertained the threshold beyond which quality of governance assists circular economic practices to mitigate carbon emissions. Also, the study revealed that quality of governance is a catalyst to promote circular economic practices in reducing carbon emissions. Finally, the study ascertains the long-run effect of the variables of interest on carbon emissions.

The purpose of this study is to test the modulating role and threshold of governance quality in the cost of living–energy poverty nexus.

Two-step System Generalized Methods of Moment empirical model with linear interaction between cost of living and governance quality was estimated. This study used data on 40 African countries over 20 years (2000–2019).

The paper shows that the conditional effect of inflation on energy poverty is negative. Thus, governance quality acts as a moderator on the relationship between inflation and energy poverty beyond a threshold. The study's principal practical implication is that governance quality reverses inflation's positive unconditional effect on energy poverty, and governance quality may be improved beyond specific policy-defined thresholds to achieve the desired goal of lowering energy poverty. Nonetheless, governance quality at initial stages would not drive the needed reduction in energy poverty unless it goes beyond the threshold of 0.03, 0.02 and 0.07.

This study recommends that policymakers should initiate policies that would ensure increased access to clean energy.

This study's main contributions are that the authors estimated the threshold beyond which governance quality reverses the adverse impact of inflation on energy poverty. Further, the authors have shown that governance quality is a catalyst to reduce energy poverty.

This study aims to elucidate the quantitative and qualitative differences in employment development between German districts. Building on ideas from competitive development and resource-based theory, the paper particularly seeks to explain enduring East-West differences between rural regions by two different forms of competitive advantage: cost leadership and quality differentiation.

This study follows a two-step empirical approach: First, an extended shift-share regression is conducted to analyze employment development in Western and Eastern German districts between 2007 and 2016. Second, the competitive share effect and other individual terms of the shift-share model are further examined in additional regressions using regional economic characteristics as exogenous variables.

The findings suggest that the above-average employment growth of the rural districts in the West is owed to the successful exploitation of experience in manufacturing that has been gathered by firms in the past 100 years or so. While their strategy is largely based on advanced and specialized resources and an innovation-driven differentiation strategy, the relatively weak employment development of Eastern rural districts might be explained by a lack of comparable long-term experiences and the related need to focus on the exploitation of basic and general resources and, accordingly, on the efficiency-based strategy of cost leadership.

This study offers an in-depth empirical analysis of how the competitive share effect, i.e. region-specific resources beyond industry structure, contributes to regional employment development. The analysis reveals that quantitative differences in rural employment development are closely related to qualitatively different levels of input factors and different regimes of competitiveness.

This empirical study aims to explore how actors in specific human resource practices (HRPs) such as line managers (LMs) impact employee productivity measures in the context of financial institutions (FI) banks.

This cross-country study adopted a qualitative methodology. It employed semi-structured interviews to collect data from purposefully selected 12 business facing directors (BFDs) working in the top 10 banks in Nigeria and the UK. The data collected were analysed with the help of the trans-positional cognition approach (TPCA) phenomenological method.

The findings of a TPCA analytical process imply that in the UK and Nigeria’s FIs, the BFDs line managers’ human resources practices (LMHRPs) resulted in a highly regulated workplace, knowledge gap, service operations challenges and subjective quantitatively driven key performance indicators, considered service productivity paradoxical elements. Although the practices in the UK and Nigerian FIs had similar labels, their aggregates were underpinned by different contextual issues.

To support LMs in better understanding and managing FIs BFDs productivity measures and outcomes, we propose the Managerial Employee Productivity Operational Definition framework as part of their toolkit. This study will be helpful for banking sectors, their regulators, policymakers, other FIs’ industry stakeholders and future researchers in the field.

Within the context of the UK and Nigeria’s FIs, this study is the first attempt to understand how LMHRPs impact BFDs productivity in this manner. It confirms that LMHRPs result in service productivity paradoxical elements with perceived or lost productivity implications.