Search results

Sustainable development is a policy approach that has gained quite a lot of popularity in recent years, especially in international circles. By attaching a specific interpretation to sustainability, population control policies have become the overriding approach to development, thus becoming the primary tool used to “promote” economic development in developing countries and to protect the environment. These policies, however, have failed to achieve either goal. By analyzing the theoretical underpinning of such policies as well as the available scientific research, this paper aims at bringing some light to these results. The findings suggest that, while the focus on population is not necessarily incorrect, the policies implemented are mistaken since they hamper the growth of a key element of economic development: human capital, and thus render it unsustainable.

This paper aims to investigate the effects of economic growth, population density and international trade on energy consumption and environmental quality in India.

Taking annual data of 1971-2011, autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing technique is applied to explore the long run link between the series. The Granger causality test is used to determine the direction of causality between the variables.

The obtained results confirm the cointegration of variables, and economic growth and population density are found to have significant positive effects on energy consumption in both the short and long runs. CO₂ emissions are also positively and significantly affected by population density and energy consumption, and negatively affected by economic growth.

The paper is original and valuable in the sense that it has considered two relevant additional explanatory variables, namely, population density and trade openness, which got little attention in the past. This research is an improvement over the previous studies because it has looked at the separate effects of explanatory variables on energy consumption, in addition to the effects on carbon emissions. Therefore, the findings of this research are more reliable because this adopted methodology is better and extensive, and the authors have properly addressed the issue of omitted variable bias.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the two-way causal nexus between macroeconomic factors such as foreign aid, industrialization, economic growth, population growth, urbanization, control of corruption and the infrastructure development index of the top-ranking African countries from 2003 to 2018.

The study adopts various econometric tools such as cross-sectional dependence test, panel unit root and cointegration test and Dumitrescu and Hurlin panel Granger causality test in ascertaining the relevant relationships between the variables under consideration.

The main findings of the Granger causality test result revealed a bidirectional causal relationship between foreign aid and infrastructure and between urbanization and infrastructure. The study also found unidirectional causality running from population growth to infrastructure while a zero causal relationship existed between industrialization and infrastructure, economic growth and infrastructure and lastly, between control of corruption and infrastructure. The study concludes that the major macroeconomic factors that influence infrastructure development in these selected African countries are foreign aid, population explosion and urbanization. Also, their high infrastructure development index has causal influence in only attracting more foreign aid and also promoting urban expansion.

To the best of the author's knowledge, the study is unique as it is the first to determine the two-way causal nexus between macroeconomic factors and infrastructure development using a sample of the top ten African countries in infrastructure ranking. The findings reflect the current situation in Africa.

The study explores the relationship among economic growth, population growth, gross savings and energy consumption over the period 1987– 2017.

The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test approach by Pesaran et al. (2001) was employed to investigate variables for the study.

In the key findings, both gross savings and population growth negatively affect economic growth. However, energy consumption has positive impact on economic growth.

These findings call for policy portfolios to address the impacts of gross savings and population growth on economic development. In particular, the financial sector needs to be revamped to be more efficient in channeling funds from the surplus units to the deficit units. It is recommended that investment be made in financial and technological innovation to provide efficient access to credits and other financial products even though individual savings may not move with economic growth.

Many studies have explored the nexus between savings and economic growth without considering population growth and energy consumption. In this study, the relationship among savings, economic growth, population growth and energy consumption provide additional knowledge in policy formulation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse interaction between the economic growth and population explosion on migration and impending global crises, resulting from a congruence of the ills affecting the world today, including climate change, water and food scarcity, poverty and environmental degradation.

This is a comparative analysis of future‐oriented literature. The paper applies the “Limits to Growth” thinking and suggests an approach where the concept of material and population growth is questioned.

Multidisciplinary examination of research literature reveals what is normally considered to be problems such as energy, food and water scarcity, poverty and environmental degradation really are not problems but symptoms; the problem is the continuing economic and population growth on a finite planet. Migration has always been a possible coping strategy for people facing economic and political problems as well as environmental changes. Continuing growth has not erased poverty and closed the gap between the rich and poor, which is a major driving force of migration. Only changing the structure of the system will do that.

The present unsustainable way of life means that society risks a multitude of crises. Many breakdowns will most likely be happening simultaneously throughout the entire environmental and socioeconomic system on a worldwide scale. Humanity has set the scene for the overshoot scenario and reversal of growth will be necessary to get out of it. New kinds of methods are needed to respond to the current challenges. It is imperative to reinvent economic theories and create new monetary and fiscal policies to solve the multidimensional ecological, economic, demographic, political and social crises humanity is facing today.

In a world where the lack of foresight exists to an alarming degree at every level of society, it is important to be constantly reminded of the imminent global crises resulting from growth. It is becoming apparent that fragmented strategies cannot address the pressing challenges. New values are needed to guide society to peaceful and equitable development in an increasingly interconnected world. This can only emerge from a new critical self‐awareness and the will to act.

The literature on growth economics mostly covers the studies on growth trajectory, convergence, issues of sustainability, etc., which are related to the so-called developed economies of the world. But the emergence of a few economies such as the members of the BRICS group in the recent past has provoked the theoreticians to shift their focus from the developed economies to these highly emerging economies as they are now chasing the countries of the developed world at least in terms of gross domestic products. But there may be differences in the roles of different factors in explaining the growth trajectories of the so-called developed economies vis-á-vis the highly emerging economies. This chapter thus aims to investigate the factors responsible for economic growth in the BRICS nations under the neoclassical growth framework for 1991–2020. The study finds that savings rate identified as the driving force behind the huge growth trends of the member countries in the group with a major contribution by China and India in the entire period, however, the results differ across sub-periods.

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the dilemma of exponential growth in economic policy and its implications on sustainable development.

The future of the world economy is premised in part on the assumption of an implicit law of increasing returns that has remained unchanged for centuries. Drawing on current data in per capita gross domestic product and population data, this paper explores the relationship between growth in populations and the distribution of wealth. Implications on economic and social policy reform are discussed, with an exemplar focus on economic incentives employed in several nations that are premised on an assumed relationship between population growth and economic return.

This paper demonstrates that much of current economic and social policy is grounded in centuries-old assumptions that may be inadequate for today's highly interrelated global and economic society, and that changing these policies would require a fundamental shift of mindset to recognise domestic human values within a global context.

Previous literature has paid less attention to the underlying assumptions of perpetual growth inherent to social and economic policy and the practicalities of its reconceptualization on global society.

Using data from 1820 onwards in a group of seven countries, namely, Australia, Chile, Denmark, France, the UK, Italy and the USA, the authors investigate if there is a long-run equilibrium relationship between the two variables (GDP and population).

Using fractional integration and cointegration methods, this paper deals with the analysis of the relationship between GDP and population using historical data.

The authors’ results show first that the two series are highly persistent, presenting orders of integration close to or above 1 in practically all cases. Testing cointegration between the two variables, the results are quite variable depending on the methodology and the bandwidth numbers used, but if cointegration takes places, it only occurs in the cases of France, Italy and the UK.

The fact that the orders of integration of all series is close to 1 indicate high levels of persistence with shocks having permanent effects and requiring strong measures to recover the original trends.

Any shock affecting the series will have a permanent nature, persisting forever.

Updated time series techniques based on concepts such as fractional integration and cointegration are used.

The threshold regression framework is used to examine the effect of foreign direct investment on growth in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The growth literature is awash with divergent evidence on the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth. Although the FDI–growth nexus has been studied in diverse ways, very few studies have examined the relationship within the framework of threshold analysis. Furthermore, even where this framework has been adopted, none of the previous studies has comprehensively examined the FDI–growth nexus in the broader SSA. In this paper, within the standard panel and threshold regression framework, the problem of determining the growth impact of FDI is revisited.

Six variables are used as thresholds – inflation, initial income, population growth, trade openness, financial market development and human capital, and the analysis is based on a large panel data set that comprises 45 SSA countries for the years 1985–2013.

The results of this study show that the direct impact of FDI on growth is largely ambiguous and inconsistent. However, under the threshold analysis, it is evident that FDI accelerates economic growth when SSA countries have achieved certain threshold levels of inflation, population growth and financial markets development. This evidence is largely invariant qualitatively and is robust to different empirical specifications. FDI enhances growth in SSA when inflation and private sector credit are below their threshold levels while human capital and population growth are above their threshold levels.

The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, the paper streamlines the threshold analysis of FDI–growth nexus to focus on countries in SSA – previous studies on FDI-growth nexus in SSA are country-specific and time series–based (see Tshepo, 2014; Raheem and Oyınlola, 2013 and Bende-Nabende, 2002). This paper provides a panel analysis and considers a broader set of up to 45 SSA countries. Such a broad set of SSA countries had never been considered in the literature. Second, the paper expands on available threshold variables to include two new important macroeconomic variables, population growth and inflation which, though are important absorptive capacities but, until now, had not been used as thresholds in the FDI–growth literature. The rationale for including these variables as thresholds stems from the evidence of an empirical relationship between population growth and economic growth, see Darrat and Al-Yousif (1999), and between inflation and economic growth, see Kremer et al. (2013).