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Textile, listed as one of the highly environmentally sensitive goods, its trade is susceptible to be influenced by the implementation of stringent environmental policies. This paper aims to investigate the long-run relationship between revealed comparative advantage (RCA) and Environmental Policy Stringency Index (EPSI) for textile exports of G20 countries in panel data setup.

Apart from trend analysis, the authors have employed Pedroni and Westerlund panel cointegration method and fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS) method to study the long-run relationship between RCA and EPSI in presence of cross-sectional dependence.

A strong link between trade and environmental stringency is observed for textile in the present study. For G20 countries, slight evidence of the Pollution Haven Hypothesis has also been witnessed in the study. Correspondingly, the results reveal the presence of long-run association between the variables under study, implying that stringent environmental policies reduce RCA for some countries, whereas some countries witness the Porter hypothesis.

The results imply that policy formulation should not aim at limiting the efforts of connecting RCA to environmental stringency but to set trade policies in a wider framework, considering environmental concerns, as these are inseparable subjects. However, this study also provides relevant real-world implications that can support further research.

The present study has important implications for textile exporters such as green innovations. The Porter hypothesis can be a beneficial tool for G20 exporters in enhancing their export performance, especially for the ones dealing in environmentally sensitive goods. This study offers relevant policy implications and provides directions for future research on global trade and environment nexus.

This study deals in a debatable area of research that evaluates the interlinkages between environmental stringency and global trade flows in the G20 countries. An important observation of the study is the asymmetrical nature of policy stringency across different countries and its impact on trade. The unavailability of updated data is the limitation of the present study.

Nursing facility inspections routinely produce statistics revealing sharp disparities in care at both the facility and the state level. But whether high rates of deficiencies are more indicative of stringent enforcement of standards, leading to improved care, or ongoing poor quality care remains unclear. Until this question is answered, families of nursing facility residents, responsible public officials and interested professionals, are all unable to make sound decisions about long-term care quality. We employ cross-sectional, panel data to compare states on multiple indices of both care quality and enforcement stringency. We use the multi-method-multi-trait approach to distinguish these concepts. We find that low rates of deficiencies are positively associated with independent measures of high quality care. But, a prominent nursing facility enforcement index likely registers poor quality care more than stringency of enforcement since it is associated positively with independent indices of poor quality care and negatively with independent measures of enforcement. Attentive publics can have reasonable confidence that low rates of deficiencies indicate high quality care. High rates tend to reflect glaring deterioration in care quality. They are less signals of stringent enforcement than of obviously poor care which prompts more visible enforcement activities. Sadly, there is little evidence suggesting that these enforcement measures improve state-level care quality and thus reduce cross-state disparities in the quality of nursing facility long-term care. However, at least some of the factors responsible for sharp disparities in nursing facility care lie within the capacity of states to rectify even in the short term.

Trade of environmentally sensitive goods (ESGs) is often exposed to countries with less stringent regulations suggesting that those countries have comparative advantage in the polluting sector. The Group of Twenty (G20) members are among the highest polluters, globally. Different stringency policies are enacted time to time in G20 to control environment pollution. However, the impact of policy stringency on export performance of ESGs is seldom examined. The paper aims to address some of the issues concerning this matter.

The present study aims to address the short run and long-run association between Revealed Comparative Advantage of ESGs and Environmental Policy Stringency Index for the period of 1990–2019 in G20. Periodic fluctuations and time adjustment mechanism are also studied. Second Generation Panel Cointegration, Vector Error Correction, Impulse Response Function and Variance Decomposition methods are employed to address the objectives.

Result is evident that more exposure to stringent environmental regulations reduces the comparative advantage of ESGs in the long run. But there is no evidence of the short-run relationship between the variables. The possible reason could be that new regulations enacted prove fruitful in the long run.

The novelty of the study is to focus on inter linkages between stringency and global export competitiveness in G20, almost nonexistent in the past studies. The study also provides a road map to policymakers to find out potential ways for sustainable development by balancing environmental stringency measures and international trade.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/IJSE-08-2022-0560

This study uncovers how government interventions, in terms of stringency and support, shape coronavirus disease 2019's (COVID-19) detrimental impact on organizations' performance. Specifically, this paper studies whether stringency and support play complementary or substitutive roles in lowering COVID-19's impact on organizations' performance.

The authors gathered primary data from USA manufacturing companies and combined this with secondary data from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) to test the proposed model with structural equation modeling (SEM).

The results show that the stringency approach increases the detrimental impact on both operational and financial performance, while economic support (to households) and fiscal spending (to organizations) work differently on lowering the impacts of COVID-19. Further, these combinative effects only influence the firm's operational performance, albeit in opposite directions.

This study advances the knowledge of government interventions by examining stringency and support's direct and interaction effects on firm performance as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The findings contribute to the literature by uncovering the unique roles of both supportive policies, thus differentiating economic support (to individuals/households) from fiscal spending (to organizations) and providing important academic, managerial and policy insights into how government should best initiate and blend stringency and support policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

This study seeks to investigate role of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic on clean energy stocks for the United States for the period 21 January 2020–16 August 2021.

At the empirical stage, the Fourier-augmented vector autoregression approach has been used.

According to the empirical results, the response of the clean energy stocks to the feverish sentiment, lockdown stringency, oil volatility, dirty assets, and monetary policy dies out within a short period of time. In addition, the authors find that there is a unidirectional causality from the feverish sentiment index and the lockdown stringency index to the clean energy stock returns; and from the monetary policy to the clean energy stocks. At the same time, there is a bidirectional causality between the lockdown stringency index and the feverish sentiment index. The empirical findings can be helpful to both practitioners and policy-makers.

Among the COVID-19 variables used in this study is a new feverish sentiment index, which has been constructed using principal component analysis. The importance of the feverish sentiment index is that it allows us to examine the impact of the aggregate level of fear in the economy on clean energy stocks.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns were implemented to achieve two goals: (1) to reduce the number of COVID-19 cases and (2) to reduce the number of COVID-19 deaths. In this paper, the authors aim to look at empirical evidence on how effectively lockdowns achieved these goals among small island developing states (SIDS) and for one specific SIDS economy, Guam.

The authors reviewed existing studies to form two hypotheses: that lockdowns reduced cases, and that lockdowns reduced deaths. Defining a lockdown as a positive value for Oxford COVID-19 government response tracker, OxCGRT's stringency index, the authors tested the above hypotheses on 185 countries, 27 SIDS economies and Guam using correlation and regression analyses, and using different measures of the strictness, duration and timing of the lockdown.

The authors found no evidence to support the hypothesis that lockdowns reduced the number of cases based on data for all 185 countries and 27 SIDS economies. While the authors found evidence to support the hypothesis in the case of Guam, the result required an unrealistically and implausibly long time lag of 365 days. As to the second hypothesis that lockdowns reduced the number of deaths, the authors found no evidence to support it for 185 countries, 27 SIDS economies as well as Guam.

From the review of the existing literature, the authors are the first to conduct this type of study among SIDS economies as a group and on Guam.

The stringency policy and economic support policy in response to and to address the coronavirus disease 2019 have become a significant concern since the end of 2019. The motivation that led to this study is that, the selection of the stringency policy and the economic support policy appear to have brought about the opposite effects of the environmental costs of carbon dioxide emissions. The study's objective is to examine the contradictory impacts of these stringency and economic support policies on carbon dioxide emissions.

This study applies panel data for the top four countries responsible for carbon dioxide emission, namely China, the United States of America, India and Russia. A fully modified ordinary least squares estimator and dynamic ordinary least squares estimator are employed to determine the long-run parameters.

The results indicate that the effect of reduced carbon dioxide emissions due to a one-unit increase in the stringency policy is greater than the effect of increased carbon dioxide emissions caused by a one-unit increase in the economic support policy. Hence, if the two policies are implemented simultaneously, a positive net effect on environmental costs will be gained.

The study investigates in a general scope, the impact these response policies have on the environment. Future researchers may enhance the research on environmental impact in different sectors due to the implementation of both policies to enrich the analytical perspective.

The results have provided implications for policymakers to emphasize more on stringency-oriented policies while giving economic support to the low-income or unemployed households in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

Despite the foreseen effects of the stringency policy and economic support policy, there has hardly been any studies that have explored empirically the nexus between both policies with carbon dioxide emissions in one empirical model. Furthermore, the paper uses the high-frequency data in determining the contradictory impacts of stringency policy and economic support policy on CO₂ emissions.

This paper aims to investigate the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on trade flows in Asia Pacific countries and explores the causality between COVID-19-related shocks and trade.

The authors used two novel techniques, namely, two-stage instrumental-variables (2SIV) approach and Juodis, Karavias and Sarafids (JKS) causality test, to examine trade dynamics in the Asia Pacific region during the pandemic.

Using the monthly trade data of 17 Asia Pacific countries between January 2020 and December 2021, the results were threefold. Firstly, the empirical analysis showed that during the COVID-19 crisis, the flow of exports tended to persist idiosyncratically in comparison to the flow of imports. In particular, a specific finding was that the persistence level in exports was about 20%–25% higher than that in imports. Secondly, the authors found that the past values of COVID-19 cases and COVID-19 deaths contain information that helps to predict exports/imports over and above the information contained in the past values of exports/imports alone. Finally, the study established that the government response and stringency indexes have a Granger-causal relationship with exports and imports.

For the foreseeable future, these findings have significant policy ramifications. Firstly, if a COVID-19 crisis-like situation emerges in the future, it will be critical for countries to maintain their competitiveness throughout the crisis, like the COVID-19 pandemic, while also rebuilding trade relationships wherever possible. Secondly, because information about government responses and measures can also be used to predict future trade flows, prudent management of government responses and stringent measures will be necessary in a crisis like COVID-19 to achieve the optimum level of exports and imports. At the same time, the trading partners should give up the idea of trade protection and focus on finding a way to balance the conflicting needs of imports and exports.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the authors, for the first time, used a 2SIV approach and JKS causality test to examine trade dynamics in the Asia Pacific region during the pandemic. In addition, the authors present the first comprehensive analysis of the evolving relationships between export and import flows and governmental policy responses under COVID-19. As a result, it contributes uniquely to both public and international economics.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, the paper aims to determine the separate effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and government actions represented by the index of stringency, containment and economic support on the attractiveness of foreign direct investment (FDI). Secondly, the paper aims to explore the impact of the interactions between the COVID-19 epidemic and government interventions on FDI.

The study uses a panel data set of 30 Asian countries during the two pandemic years 2020 and 2021 to investigate the effect of government actions on the resilience of FDI attractiveness factors.

The empirical results reveal the negative effect of COVID-19 on FDI inflows and attractiveness factors. However, government responses have a positive and statistically significant effect on the FDI attractiveness factors such as economic growth, trade openness and human and technological capital development and contribute to the economic recovery of the Asian region.

The empirical findings can provide useful information for policymakers in designing macroeconomic policies and taking government measures to improve their investment environment and attract FDI.

The study shows that government responses, economic support, containment and health policies are effective in containing viruses, reducing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and strengthening resilience in FDI attractiveness factors. It also indicates that foreign investors are responding positively to government measures.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the influence that nation-states can have on the engagement of international marketing activities. The purpose of this study is to understand the influence of the institutional response to the COVID-19 pandemic on international marketing activities and to highlight the need to formally incorporate institutional economics into the study of international marketing phenomena.

The paper uses institutional economics as the environmental element of the general theory of competitive rationality to present a foundation for understanding how state actions influence marketing and international marketing activities. Data are presented and empirically tested, demonstrating the heterogeneity of government influence on personal and economic freedoms during the pandemic, both of which influenced international marketing activities. To broaden the implications of this work, we also provide anecdotal illustrations unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic to demonstrate the breadth of nation-state influence on international marketing activities.

Heterogeneity in nation-state formal and informal institutional elements influence international marketing activities during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, other incidents, unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrate the importance of contextualizing international marketing activities under a holistic institutional framework.

The paper employs the general theory of competitive rationality along with institutional economics to provide a theoretical foundation to better understand the differential impact on international marketing as a result of formal and informal institutional influences. This general framework can be employed to provide a holistic understanding of both international and cross-national marketing activities.