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This paper empirically investigates the spatial effects of trade openness on CO2 emissions in a panel of 54 middle‐income countries over the period 1996–2013. It adopts a static spatial panel data approach as well as a dynamic spatial panel data model with common factors to address the problems of spatial dependency and spillover effects and to explain the non‐stationary diffusion process of CO2 emissions across middle‐income countries. The empirical results indicate that: (i) there is a spatial dependence in CO2 emissions across the sample of middle‐income countries; (ii) Both global common factors and local spatial dependence are important drivers of the propagation patterns of CO2 emissions over the selected time‐period; (iii) trade openness, per capita real income, urbanization and energy intensity are the main determinants of CO2 emissions; (iv) the direct effect of trade openness on CO2 emissions is significantly positive; and (v) the indirect effect of trade openness on CO2 emissions is so significantly negative to overcome the positive direct effect, which implies a negative and significant total effect. This study provides robust policy implications for the sample of middle‐income countries to help them improve environmental quality.

This article investigates the causal nexus between electricity consumption and economic growth in Tunisia for the period 1971–2013 by using autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach of cointegration and Granger causality tests. The empirical findings indicate the existence of a long-term relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth. Besides, they support the conservation hypothesis in the long run, while they confirm the growth hypothesis in the short run.

This paper extends the empirical debate of Ragoubi and El Harbi (2018) on the dynamic relationship between entrepreneurship and income inequality. Using a dynamic spatial panel data analysis for both 33 high-income countries and 39 middle-income and low-income countries over the period 2004–2014, the main empirical findings are summarised as follows. First, the results indicate that entrepreneurship is a spatial and persistent phenomenon. Second, there is strong support for the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between entrepreneurship and income inequality espoused by the Kuznets Curve hypothesis for middle-income and low-income countries. Third, the interaction between income inequality and income per capita has a significant negative effect on the entrepreneurial activity for middle-income and low-income countries. Fourth, a significant positive association is found between the interaction variable and entrepreneurship for high-income countries. Fifth, the findings show evidence of significant positive and negative short-run direct effects of income inequality on the entrepreneurial activity for middle-income and low-income countries. Finally, there are significant negative short-run spillover effects of income inequality on the entrepreneurial activity for middle-income and low-income countries.