To address global challenges
, 193 countries have committed to the 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
. Quantifying progress towards achieving the SDGs is essential to track ...global efforts towards sustainable development and guide policy development and implementation. However, systematic methods for assessing spatio-temporal progress towards achieving the SDGs are lacking. Here we develop and test systematic methods to quantify progress towards the 17 SDGs at national and subnational levels in China. Our analyses indicate that China's SDG Index score (an aggregate score representing the overall performance towards achieving all 17 SDGs) increased at the national level from 2000 to 2015. Every province also increased its SDG Index score over this period. There were large spatio-temporal variations across regions. For example, eastern China had a higher SDG Index score than western China in the 2000s, and southern China had a higher SDG Index score than northern China in 2015. At the national level, the scores of 13 of the 17 SDGs improved over time, but the scores of four SDGs declined. This study suggests the need to track the spatio-temporal dynamics of progress towards SDGs at the global level and in other nations.
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FZAB, GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
...companies need new business models to create private and public value. ...materials become scarce and costs rise. ...a global platform should be established for sharing knowledge about the ...circular economy. ...policymakers should develop ways to enforce regulations, settle disputes and implement sanctions on a global scale.
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EMUNI, FIS, FZAB, GEOZS, GIS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, MFDPS, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, SBMB, SBNM, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VKSCE, ZAGLJ
Democracy Does Cause Growth Acemoglu, Daron; Naidu, Suresh; Restrepo, Pascual ...
The Journal of political economy,
02/2019, Volume:
127, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We provide evidence that democracy has a positive effect on GDP per capita. Our dynamic panel strategy controls for country fixed effects and the rich dynamics of GDP, which otherwise confound the ...effect of democracy. To reduce measurement error, we introduce a new indicator of democracy that consolidates previous measures. Our baseline results show that democratizations increase GDP per capita by about 20 percent in the long run. We find similar effects using a propensity score reweighting strategy as well as an instrumental-variables strategy using regional waves of democratization. The effects are similar across different levels of development and appear to be driven by greater investments in capital, schooling, and health.
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CEKLJ, INZLJ, IZUM, KILJ, NMLJ, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
Health spending growth in the United States is projected to average 5.8 percent for 2014-24, reflecting the Affordable Care Act's coverage expansions, faster economic growth, and population aging. ...Recent historically low growth rates in the use of medical goods and services, as well as medical prices, are expected to gradually increase. However, in part because of the impact of continued cost-sharing increases that are anticipated among health plans, the acceleration of these growth rates is expected to be modest. The health share of US gross domestic product is projected to rise from 17.4 percent in 2013 to 19.6 percent in 2024.
This paper examines the macroeconomic factors influencing the profitability performance of private telecommunication firms in Malaysia. A yearly basis data between 2007 and 2016, which contained a ...total number of 49 data observations were analyzed using the Random Effects Model to estimate the factors of concern. The sources of these data have been predominantly extracted from DataStream. The variables involved in this investigation were liquidity (LIQ), leverage (LEV), firm size (SIZE), and gross domestic product (GDP). This study has been motivated by the declining profitability performance of private telecommunication firms in Malaysia, which has been attributed to the decreasing return on assets. The findings suggest that leverage has a significant and negative relationship with return on assets, while liquidity has a negative insignificant towards the firms’ profitability. On the other hand, firm size and gross domestic product have a substantial and positive relationship with return on assets. Moreover, the findings seemed to suggest that the bigger the size of a firm, the higher the total assets would be, which in turn, would improve the firm’s profitable performance. In sum, the prerequisite attribute that a telecommunication firm needed to possess in attaining high profitability performance was its strong and high productivity in the management of its total assets.
Climate change will have far-reaching consequence for the future of tourism. A Climate Change Vulnerability Index for Tourism (CVIT) comprised of 27 indicators provides a transparent and systematic ...first analysis of the differential vulnerability of the tourism sector in 181 countries. Countries with the lowest vulnerability are found in western and northern Europe, central Asia, Canada and New Zealand. High sector vulnerability is found in Africa, Middle East, South Asia and Small Island Developing States. Vulnerability is highest in many countries where tourism represents the largest proportion of GDP and regions where tourism growth is expected to be the strongest over the coming decades. Climate change will pose an increasing barrier to tourism contributions to the Sustainable Development Goals.
•Lowest climate change vulnerability for tourism is found in higher-latitude OECD countries•Highest climate change vulnerability often coincides with highest sector GDP contribution•Highest vulnerability exists in regions where tourism growth is expected to be the strongest•Climate change will pose an increasing barrier to tourism contributions to UN SDGs•Consideration of climate change should be strengthened in tourism development plans
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Understanding the causes of economic inequality is critical for achieving equitable economic development. To investigate whether global warming has affected the recent evolution of inequality, we ...combine counterfactual historical temperature trajectories froma suite of global climate models with extensively replicated empirical evidence of the relationship between historical temperature fluctuations and economic growth. Together, these allow us to generate probabilistic country-level estimates of the influence of anthropogenic climate forcing on historical economic output. We find very high likelihood that anthropogenic climate forcing has increased economic inequality between countries. For example, per capita gross domestic product (GDP) has been reduced 17–31% at the poorest four deciles of the population-weighted country-level per capita GDP distribution, yielding a ratio between the top and bottom deciles that is 25% larger than in a world without global warming. As a result, although between-country inequality has decreased over the past half century, there is ∼90% likelihood that global warming has slowed that decrease. The primary driver is the parabolic relationship between temperature and economic growth, with warming increasing growth in cool countries and decreasing growth in warm countries. Although there is uncertainty in whether historicalwarming has benefited some temperate, rich countries, for most poor countries there is >90% likelihood that per capita GDP is lower today than if global warming had not occurred. Thus, our results show that, in addition to not sharing equally in the direct benefits of fossil fuel use, many poor countries have been significantly harmed by the warming arising from wealthy countries’ energy consumption.
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BFBNIB, NMLJ, NUK, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
We investigate the role of uncertainty in business cycles. First, we demonstrate that microeconomic uncertainty rises sharply during recessions, including during the Great Recession of 2007-2009. ...Second, we show that uncertainty shocks can generate drops in gross domestic product of around 2.5% in a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. However, we also find that uncertainty shocks need to be supplemented by first-moment shocks to fit consumption over the cycle. So our data and simulations suggest recessions are best modelled as being driven by shocks with a negative first moment and a positive second moment. Finally, we show that increased uncertainty can make first-moment policies, like wage subsidies, temporarily less effective because firms become more cautious in responding to price changes.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, INZLJ, KILJ, NLZOH, NMLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK, ZRSKP
We explored whether rising income in nations is associated with increasing subjective well-being (SWB), with several advances over earlier work. Our methods are improved in that across time, the same ...well-being questions were asked in the same order, and we employed broad and equivalent representative samples over time from a large number of nations. We also assessed psychosocial factors that might mediate the relation of income and SWB. We found that changes in household income were associated with concomitant changes in life evaluations, positive feelings, and negative feelings. The effects of gross domestic product (GDP) change were weaker and significant only for life evaluations, perhaps because GDP was a less certain index of the standard of living of the average household. The association of income and SWB is more likely to occur when the average person's material welfare accompanies rising income, when people become more satisfied with their finances, and when people become more optimistic about their futures. People did not adapt to the income rises during the period of years we studied, in that income rises produced SWB increases that did not return to earlier levels. It appears that previous researchers failed to come to agreement because of the small sample sizes of the nations, the inconsistent methods across years and surveys, and the lack of measures of potential mediating variables. Analyses of income relative to people in one's nation and between-nation slopes together suggest that income standards are now largely global, with little effect of national social comparison.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ, UPUK
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