The purpose of this article is to examine the causal relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI), exports and economic growth in two panels of developing countries (eight European developing countries and eight Asian developing countries). Panel-VECM causality is employed for investigating a tri-variate model of FDI, exports and GDP. Causality results in the European developing panel indicate bidirectional causality between GDP and FDI, and unidirectional causality from GDP and FDI to exports in the shortrun. The empirical results of the Asian developing panel indicate bidirectional causality between exports and economic growth in the short-run. Moreover, there is evidence of long-run causality from export and FDI to economic growth, and long-run causality from economic growth and export to FDI for both of the aforementioned panels.

Improving the environmental quality and economic growth simultaneously, and examining the variables affecting this nexus, has been one of the most important issues for researchers and policymakers in recent years, especially following the United Nations 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals. The aim of this study is to investigate the nexus among the ecological footprint as a multi-aspect indicator of environmental degradation, economic growth, renewable and non-renewable energies, and governance quality within the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis framework for two panels of European and Asian emerging countries during 1996–2017. For this purpose, we employ second-generation panel techniques that consider cross-sectional dependency in panel data. Augmented Mean Group estimation results indicate an inverted U-shape nexus among the economic growth and ecological footprint, which implies validation of the EKC hypothesis in all two panels of countries. The findings indicate the positive impact of non-renewable energy and the negative influence of governance quality on the ecological footprint in all two panels. At the same time, there is evidence of the negative impact of renewable energy on ecological footprint only in European emerging countries. In summary, the findings recommend that governments and policymakers pay closer attention to implementing non-renewable energy restrictive policies and renewable energy incentive policies. Furthermore, this is important to plan for improving various dimensions of governance quality to achieve better adoption and implementation of environmental policies, especially in the Asian emerging countries where it can lead to a more positive impact on environmental quality according to the results of estimated coefficients.JEL Codes: C33, Q01, Q20, Q50

The purpose of this study is to examine the short-run and long-run causal relationship between economic growth, renewable energy, trade openness and carbon dioxide emission (CO 2 ) as an indicator of environmental quality for two panels of developing countries including nine Asian developing countries and six European developing countries. A panel vector error correction model (Panel-VECM) causality is employed to investigate causality relation between the variables of interest. The empirical finding of short-run indicates bidirectional causality between GDP and CO 2 emissions and unidirectional causality from renewable energy and trade openness to CO 2 emissions for both Asian and European panels. Furthermore, there is evidence of unidirectional causality from GDP to renewable energy for Asian panel, while for European panel, bidirectional causality exist between renewable energy and GDP.

No abstract