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The study examined the long-run and causal relationship between international tourism receipts (ITR), social distribution, FDI inflows, and carbon (CO2) emissions to verify the different alternative and plausible hypotheses, i.e., environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis, “pollution haven” hypothesis (PHH), and “resource efficiency” (REF) hypothesis, in a panel of Group of Seven (G-7) countries for the period of 1995–2015. The study employed panel random effect (RE) regression and panel causality test for robust inferences. The results show that ITR and FDI inflows increase CO2 emissions to verify PHH while government education expenditures (GEE) decrease CO2 emissions to substantiate the REF hypothesis across countries. The results validate the inverted U-shaped EKC relationship between CO2 emissions and economic growth (EG) with the turning point of US$30,900. In addition, GEE increase ITR while healthcare expenditures (HEXP) decrease ITR, which partially supported the REF hypothesis in a panel of countries. The impact of income inequality (INEQ) on ITR is positive at current time period while at later stages INEQ declines ITR that supported an inverted U-shaped relationship between them. The causality estimates confirm the bidirectional relationship between ITR and EG, while there is unidirectional casualty running from (i) ITR, EG, FDI inflows, and GEE to CO2 emissions, (ii) FDI inflows to ITR, (iii) GEE to EG, (iv) EG to social expenditures, (v) income inequality to health expenditures, (vi) social expenditures (SEXP) to ITR, and (vii) INEQ to ITR. There is no causal relationship found between ITR and EG during the study time period. The findings endorse the need for efficient resource spending, sustainable tourism (STR), and rational income distribution to improve environmental sustainability agenda in a panel of G-7 countries.

In order to give guidance to improve tourism competitiveness and sustainable development, it is particularly important to identify and analyze the factors and mechanisms that affect efficiency. The SBM–DEA model including undesirable outputs was used to measure the tourism efficiency of 30 provinces in China from 2006 to 2019. Combined with the compound DEA model, the sensitivity of each province to the fluctuation of the input–output index was mined. The exploratory spatial analysis method and fixed effect model were used to analyze the spatial change and driving factors of tourism efficiency. The results show that: (1) the tourism efficiency of each province in China fluctuated from 2006 to 2019, and the average value was raised from 0.12 to 0.71, generally reaching the grade of medium and high efficiency; (2) the spatial difference of tourism efficiency is significant, but there is no obvious spatial correlation; (3) the most important input factors to tourism efficiency are environmental resources, tourism resource inputs and tourism infrastructure construction, and tourism fixed asset investment is redundant. (4) Optimizing the industrial structure, strengthening the introduction of core technology, and continuously promoting the process of urbanization and marketization are important ways to improve the efficiency of tourism.

In light of the increasing worldwide apprehension regarding environmental sustainability, it has become imperative to understand the intricacies that exist between a sustainable environment, economic growth, and tourism growth. This study focuses on sustainable development goals (SDGs) and their relationship to tourism development. Therefore, the current study investigates the relationship between the primary dimensions of sustainability, such as economic, environmental, and social sustainability, and the growth of tourism in G7 countries, using data from 2000 to 2021. After establishing the cointegration between the variables using the Westerlund cointegration test, the long-run and short-run estimations of coefficients were carried out using the Panel ADRL framework (PMG). The results of the PMG test indicate that in the long run, economic growth and CO 2 emissions have a positive and significant relationship with tourism growth, whereas ecological footprint, human development, and unemployment have a negative and significant relationship. However, in the short run, only economic growth and unemployment had significant coefficients and negative relationships with tourism development. Finally, this study investigated the causal direction of the variables using the Dumitrescu Hurlin causality test. A unidirectional causal link exists between tourism growth and GDP, ecological footprint, CO 2 , unemployment, and the human development index. The results also suggest that economic growth encourages tourism development, validating the growth-led tourism hypothesis. The policy implication of this study is that to achieve overall sustainability, the tourism industry has to develop environmentally friendly practices with a focus on economic and social well-being.

A growing number of recent research analyse the trade balance impact on economic growth. However, ambiguous results of studies imply the need for the research as the deteriorating trade balance hinders economic growth. This research aims to investigate the impact of the trade balance on economic growth as well as to evaluate it during the periods of trade deficit. Our estimations are based on the European Union (EU) 28 countries panel data over the period of 1998-2018, using the OLS method of multivariate regression analysis with fixed effects and focusing on two strategies: (i) including all trade balance periods, and (ii) adding deficit dummy variable seeking to evaluate whether during deficit periods we can find different and significant effect on economic growth. Evaluating all trade balance periods, the obtained results indicate the negative and lagging impact of the trade balance on economic growth, and no significant differences of the impact were identified during the deficit periods. The deterioration of trade balance reduces average economic growth and from linear relationship evaluation, we can state that it does not matter whether it starts from trade deficit or surplus result. The results obtained may also obscure the possibility of a non-linear effect, which would suggest a stronger negative impact on economic growth when the trade balance deteriorates in the presence of a large trade deficit. When discussing directions for further research it would make sense to consider other factors, such as the size of the deficit and its permanence.

This paper considers a panel of 80 countries across all continents, over the period 1999–2019, and uses panel generalized method of moments system estimations with data from the World Bank Global Financial Development database, to explain the evolution of the bank non-performing-loans-to-total-loans ratio. The results obtained provide clear evidence that banks with high profitability, benefiting from market stability and located in countries with increasing economic growth are not expected to have high values of the non-performing-loans-to-total-loans ratio. On the other hand, high values of this ratio are robustly associated with an increase of the bank-cost-to-income ratio, market concentration, and bank regulation. The paper also contributes to the literature by assessing the relevance of the level of each country’s income and economic integration. Overall, the results obtained reveal few differences between high-income and non-high-income countries and between Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries and non-OECD countries. However, considering only the years after the onset of the global financial crisis (2009–2019), there is robust evidence that bank regulation contributed to a decrease in the non-performing-loans-to-total-loans ratio, but only in non-high-income countries and non-OECD countries. Finally, the results for all considered panels, clearly show that the promotion of economic growth is always the best way to assure a decrease in the non-performing-loans-to-total-loans ratio, reducing the likelihood of banking losses as well as potential financial crisis.

The paper applies survival analysis to identify the determinants of terrorist group duration. Our sample includes 367 terrorist organizations that operated during 1970-2007. Consistent with the theory, determinants of these groups' survival include their tactics, sizes, ideological basis, regions of operation, and base-country characteristics. Cross-sectional and panel estimates are reported. Terrorist organizations fare better if they are larger in size, diversify their attack modes, are animated by religiosity rather than secular political goals, and base their operations in the Middle East or Africa. Groups' longevity is bolstered by democratic institutions and an intermediate level of ethnic fractionalization at home.

A growing number of recent works support the idea of debt threshold level (turning point), above which debt starts reducing economic growth. However, estimated threshold varies sharply across studies and gives a little insight into what the optimal level of debt is. The point is that there is no single turning point that could be applied to all countries and a proper investigation is needed on factors, which shape the debt impact on growth. This study aims to investigate whether debt threshold level depends on government effectiveness (one of the aspects of countries' institutional quality) and trade balance. Our SYS-GMM estimates (and alternatively OLS and LSDV for robustness check) are based on the unbalanced panel of 152 countries over the period of 1996-2016 and on two strategies: (i) splitting of sample into subsamples according to trade balance and government effectiveness and (ii) including debt and government effectiveness, debt and trade deficit interactions. The obtained results are in line with those which confirm inverted U-shaped debt-growth relationship with clear debt turning point dependence on government effectiveness. However, effective governance is not enough to avoid the negative debt effect. Trade balance seems to be more crucial factor than institutional quality, on which threshold level depends.

This paper provides empirical evidence that supports the view that the quality of institutions is an important determinant of long-term growth in European countries. It shows that an initial high government debt level coupled with institutional quality below the EU average tends to be associated with particularly poor longterm real growth performance. Interestingly, the detrimental effect of high debt levels on long-term growth seems cushioned by the presence of very sound institutions. The paper offers some evidence that sound institutions may be particularly important for long-term growth in countries in which the exchange rate tool is no longer available and less so in countries with flexible exchange rate regimes. The empirical findings on the importance of institutions are robust to various measures of output growth, different measures of institutional indicators, different sample sizes, different country groupings and to the inclusions of additional control variables.

Using panel estimates and a sample including all 28 European Union (EU) countries, this paper seeks to improve upon the existing literature with empirical evidence on the role that banking institutions can play in promoting economic growth. Banking sector performance is proxied by relevant operational, capital, liquidity and asset quality financial ratios. Economic growth is represented by the annual gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate. The estimations take into account the recent international financial crisis and consider three panels: one for the time period 1998–2012, a second one for the years before the crisis (1998–2006) and another for the subinterval 2007–2012. The results allow us to draw conclusions not only about the importance of the various financial ratios to economic growth but also regarding reactions to the recent crisis.

This study analyses the relationship between per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, gross domestic product, gross inland energy consumption, and renewable energy consumption for a panel of 28 countries of European Union in the period 1990–2016. Two theoretical models, a quadratic and a cubic one, are used to estimate the shape of the environmental curve and to test the Kuznets hypothesis. The panel cointegration approach proved the existence of long-run equilibrium relations among the four macroeconomic indicators. Empirical estimations, using panel data techniques, as well as heterogeneous regression for each individual country in the panel, show non-conclusive evidence for the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. The least square estimates, with the variables in log per capita form, reveal that the inverted U-shaped EKC hypothesis is verified for the panel and for 17 of the 28 EU countries. Estimates of the cubic model show that the environmental curve has an inverted N-shaped form. These results do not hold when the values are in non-logarithmic form. In addition, the estimations for all models show that an increase of gross energy consumption leads to an increase of GHGs, while an increase of renewable energy consumption leads to a reduction in GHG emissions.