This historical dataset regarding island and coastal economies has been built with the intent of making up for the gaps and shortcoming of the economic literature on long-term island development. This dataset gathers Imports, Exports, GDP, Population and Exchange Rate data on a yearly basis. The idea was to gather as much data as possible, with the reference period being 1900-2021 for foreign trade and 1960-2021 for GDP data. This dataset is relevant as it opens up new possibilities of long-term systematic comparisons between a great number of territories. Data were collected from international databases (UNCTAD, UN Statistics Division, UN Statistical Yearbook) when available. Some scholarly works were also used, most notably Mitchell [4] and Bulmer-Thomas [2]. When these sources were exhausted, the author went himself to the French Archives (INSEE) and the British National Archives (at Kew) to consult physical copies of colonial reports in order to find data prior to the 1950\'s. Other islands\' data were reconstructed by contacting the local archives or statistical offices. For the foreign trade dataset, data are expressed in local currencies, then transformed to current USD, to constant 2005 USD equivalent and finally to constant 2005 USD per capita equivalent. These different levels of disaggregation are voluntarily left for each reader to use. For the GDP dataset, data are presented in current USD, current USD per capita and constant 2015 USD per capita equivalent. Different datasets have different levels of disaggregation. Some territories could not be included for practical reasons. The Italian islands are not included as the author could not go to the National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) to consult the data in person. German island colonies in the Pacific could not be studied as the author does not understand the older German. Also, the India Office of the British Colonial Archives has been transferred to Qatar National Library, which scans and makes documents progressively available. Finally, the Western Pacific Archives were transferred to the University of Auckland Special Collections since 2002 and the author could not consult them. A coordinated effort by the research community could resolve these issues.

On the one hand, economies, particularly developing ones, need to grow. On the other hand, climate change is the most pressing issue globally, and nations should take the necessary measures. Such a complex task requires new theoretical and empirical models to capture this complexity and provide new insights. Our study uses a newly developed theoretical framework that involves renewable energy consumption (REC) and total factor productivity (TFP) alongside traditional factors of CO2 emissions. It provides policymakers with border information compared to traditional models, such as the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), being limited to income and population. Advanced panel time series methods are also employed, addressing panel data issues while producing not only pooled but also country-specific results. 20 Renewable Energy Country Attractiveness Index (RECAI) nations are considered in this study. The results show that REC, TFP, and exports reduce CO2 emissions with elasticities of 0.3, 0.4, and 0.3, respectively. Oppositely, income and imports increase emissions with elasticities of 0.8 and 0.3. Additionally, we show that RECAI countries are commonly affected by global and regional factors. Moreover, we find that shocks can create permanent changes in the levels of the factors but only temporary changes in their growth rates. The main policy implication of the findings is that authorities should implement measures boosting TFP and REC. These factors are driven mainly by technological progress, innovation, and efficiency gains. Thus, they can simultaneously reduce emissions while promoting long-run green economic growth, which addresses the complexity mentioned above to some extent.

International trade is considered an important conduit for disseminating environmentally sound technologies (ESTs), but there is limited evidence of how trade in ESTs affects domestic firms\' green innovation, particularly for importers. To close this knowledge gap, we first develop a basic model to conceptually examine how imported ESTs impact enterprises\' performance in green innovation. Then, by creating a distinct combined database of firm-level trade and patent data from 2000 to 2016, we give empirical evidence. Our empirical results demonstrate a significant crowding-out effect of imported ESTs on green innovation, whereas technological proximity, learning capacity, and government subsidies can help to lessen this adverse effect. Furthermore, imported ESTs of peer firms in the same industry or imported ESTs of downstream industries have beneficial spillover effects on a focal firm\'s green innovation. Our study offers fresh perspectives on the current status and potential future of liberalizing trade in ESTs, as well as on the sources of green innovation.

In recent years, addressing the issue of carbon emissions has gained significant attention in the field of environmental sustainability. This study aims to contribute to the existing literature by investigating the interplay between eco-innovation, international trade, energy productivity, and consumption-based carbon emissions in the context of the BRICS economies. Using data spanning the period from 1990 to 2020, we employ advanced methodological techniques to overcome challenges associated with cross-section dependency, non-stationarity, and heterogeneity. The results of our study provide compelling evidence of a long-term cointegrating association between eco-innovation, energy productivity, economic growth, imports, exports and consumption-based carbon emissions. The results reveal that eco-innovations, exports, and energy productivity are associated with reductions in CO2 emissions. Conversely, imports and GDP growth contribute to higher CO2 emissions. Our findings have significant implications for policymakers, businesses, and stakeholders involved in shaping environmental policies and sustainable development strategies. The observed negative correlations between eco-innovation, exports, energy productivity, and consumption-based carbon emissions offer a clear channel for mitigating environmental pollution. By prioritizing and promoting eco-innovation initiatives, encouraging sustainable exports, and enhancing energy productivity, policymakers can effectively reduce carbon emissions and foster sustainable economic growth.

There is an urgent need for biosurveillance of unregulated African meat imports at border points of entry in destination markets. This is underscored by recent pandemics linked to exotic wildlife products. Our objective was to catalog the quantity of meat that is informally transported from Africa into and through Europe often without any veterinary or sanitary checks. We searched and included peer-reviewed studies that contained data on the intercontinental movement of unregulated meat from the African continent. This was followed by an investigation of the reported contamination of such meat. We included fifteen airport studies with limited data on this topic. The references included in this review describe the quantity of meat found at border inspection posts and the presence of pathogens. Disease-causing pathogens were found to be present, and the results are organized into bacteria, virus, and parasite categories. The species of animal meat found in this review were linked to CITES-protected species some of which are known reservoir hosts for infectious diseases. This represents a potential and unquantified human health risk to populations along the supply chain, and a loss to biodiversity in supply countries. Meat samples described in this review were primarily found opportunistically by Customs officials, indicating that any estimate of the total quantities passing undetected through border checkpoints must remain tentative, and cannot rule out the possibility that it is indeed considerably higher. We propose a template for future studies regarding African meat imports at border points of entry. The result of this review illustrates a gap in knowledge and lacunae regarding the amount of unregulated African meat imports worldwide, the pathogens it may contain, and the resulting biodiversity loss that occurs from the intercontinental movement of this meat.

The world economy has recently navigated through the pandemic caused by the coronavirus. Almost all the affected countries have responded with stringency measures to control the pandemic. However, these restrictions appear to have critically impacted the global supply chain and cross-border movement of goods. In this regard, we attempt to investigate the impact of pandemic-related stringency measures on India\'s import demand. For this purpose, we use bilateral monthly import data of India with its major trading counterparts. Our findings suggest that stringency measures have a positive impact on imports, indicating that the economy relies more on imported items when its domestic production and supply chain are disrupted by the pandemic-related restrictions. Conversely, the import origin countries\' restrictions have a negative impact on Indian imports, indicating that these restrictions have adversely affected the production and supply chain in origin countries, thereby reducing the overall flow of imports to India. We also find that economic policy uncertainty of home and product origin countries has a negative impact on Indian imports. Our results also confirm that the pandemic-related restrictions and different types of uncertainty have an asymmetric effect on imports.

The relationship between trade flows and exchange rate uncertainty is still being debated in academic circles while examining the effects of exchange rate uncertainty on India\'s bilateral trade flows, prior research disregard the \"third-county\" effect. This study investigates the effect of third-country risk on the amount of India-US commodity trade using time series data for 79 Indian commodity export and 81 Indian commodity import businesses. The results show that the volume of trade in a select few industries is considerably impacted by third-country risk in terms of dollar/yen and rupee/yen. According to the findings, rupee-dollar volatility affects 15 exporting industries in the short run and 9 industries in the long run. Similarly, the third country effect demonstrates that Rupee-Yen volatility affects 9 Indian exporting industries both in the short and long run. The results show that rupee-dollar volatility tends to have a short-term impact on 25 importing industries and a long-term impact on 15 sectors. Similar to this, the third country effect demonstrates that Rupee-Yen volatility tends to have an impact on 9 Indian importing industries over the short and long term.

A climate disaster can be devastating, but its challenges and losses provide some opportunities to other countries. Therefore, in this paper, we examine the impact of climate risk on international trade with a particular focus on developed and developing countries. Using a large sample of 160 countries between 2006 and 2019, we find that climate disaster is positively associated with high international trade. An increase in the climate disaster index will lead to an increase of about 5.9% in imports as a proportion of GDP. This is significant given that the mean of imports of the sample countries is 48%. Regarding the flow of trade, importation is likely to increase by about 6.7% and export to decrease by 0.65% after the occurrence of climate disasters in developing countries. Conversely, we did not find significant changes in imports and a weak association with exports for developed countries. We attribute this differential impact of climate disasters between developed and developing countries to the preparedness and risk mitigation mechanism in developed countries. The result suggests that the long-term effect of climate disasters increasing overall international trade is due to increasing imports in developing countries. Additional analyses demonstrate the robustness of these results to different model specifications and measurements of variables. Our results imply that climate change and its associated natural disasters offer more trade opportunities for developed countries than developing countries, highlighting the climate injustices between the high and low climate change contributors.

MENA region is full of natural resources and has a huge mineral sector in their economies. CO2 emissions are increasing global warming and foreign trade and investments can play their roles in determining CO2 emissions in the resource-rich MENA countries. Moreover, spatial linkages are expected in the emissions and trade relationship, which could catch less attention in the environmental literature of the MENA region. Thus, the present research is motivated to capture the contributions of exports, imports, and Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) in consumption-based CO2 (CBC) emissions in twelve MENA economies from 1995 to 2020 by applying Spatial Autoregressive (SAR) Model. Our results exhibit the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). Moreover, the impact of exports is found negative in direct and total estimates. Thus, exports of the MENA region are reducing CBC emissions in the MENA region and transferring emissions to their importing partners. Moreover, the spillovers of exports are found positive and exports of one MENA country are also responsible for the transfer of CBC emissions to other MENA neighboring countries, which corroborates the trade linkages of the MENA region. Imports have a positive effect on CBC emissions in direct and total effects. This result confirms the fact of energy-intensive imports of the MENA region, which have environmental consequences in the domestic economies and the whole MENA region. FDI increases CBC emissions in direct and total estimates. This result substantiates the pollution Haven hypothesis in the MENA region and is in line with the fact that FDI is mostly coming in the mineral, construction, and chemical sectors. The study suggests that MENA countries should promote exports to reduce CBC emissions and to reduce energy-intensive imports in the region to save the environment from CBC emissions. Moreover, FDI should be attracted to the clean production process and environmental standards should be raised to avoid the environmental problems of FDI in the MENA region.

Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and Africa in general are known as the lowest emitters of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. However, CO2 emissions in SSA are increasing, making it a problem of concern and calls for attention given its adverse consequences on human health and climate change. International trade is argued to have a vital role in global and SSA emissions in diverse ways, leading to doubts of whether trade is good or bad to the environment. As a result, we explore the environmental effect of international trade in 33 SSA countries from 1990 to 2020. The study further evaluates the differential effect of exports and imports on environmental pollution. The generalized method of moment estimator and Dumitrescu and Hurlin (D-H) causality test were utilized. The results revealed that the overall effect of trade reduces environmental pollution by about 0.10% and 0.79% in both the short and long run, respectively. Again, we observe that exports and imports minimize environmental pollution of about 0.07% and 0.45% (0.08% and 0.58%) in the short run (long run), respectively. Regarding D-H results, we noticed the existence of bidirectional causality between total trade and environmental pollution, whereas exports and imports have a unidirectional causality from CO2 emissions to exports and imports. We conclude based on the findings that international trade causes pollution reduction in SSA. Furthermore, we establish that exports and imports have a homogeneous impact on environmental pollution in SSA. Given the results, we call for trade initiatives that ensure improvement in environmental and energy efficiency technologies related to production and transportation of exported and imported goods and services.