Our study illuminates the impact of international trade on environmental quality in lower-middle-income countries by using CO2 emission as the proxy for environmental degradation. Using the Pooled Mean Group estimation along with validity tests, the results show that in the long run, CO2 emission is affected by merchandise export, merchandise import, FDI, GDP per capita, and renewable energy consumption. The impact of trade on CO2 emission is mixed because our findings show that merchandise export and import have opposite effects. In addition, our results reveal that Environmental Kuznets Curve exists in the long run with N-sharped. The increase in GDP per capita leads to the raise of CO2 emission at first, but later comes the decrease and then increase. The paper has relevant implications for law makers.

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The development in information technology results in a significant increase in bank competition. The question of whether increased competition improves bank profitability and risk reduction is important in many aspects. This paper analyzes the impact of competition on profitability and risk in the context of Vietnam using OLS estimator on data set of 37 Vietnamese commercial banks. The main results present that banks with a higher competition index tend to have higher profitability which is measured by ROE and NIM. In addition, our empirical results also show that banks tend to take on more risk when facing increased competition.