The scale of the problem is difficult to overstate. In the first quarter of 2025, the NEET rate, the share of young people not in employment, education or training, stood at 37.1 percent for South Africans aged 15 to 24, with young women at 37.5 percent slightly worse affected than young men at 36.7 percent. In the broader 15 to 34 age group, the rate climbed to 45.1 percent, with 48.1 percent of women affected compared with 42.2 percent of men. These figures are barely improved from 2013, when 37 percent of female youth were outside work and education against 30 percent of males, despite government interventions including the Expanded Public Works Program, the National Youth Development Program, and the Employment Equity Act. Against this backdrop, Nnyanzi set out to test whether globalization, in its many forms, has been part of the solution or part of the problem.

The study’s methodological core is the ARDL framework developed by Pesaran, Shin and Smith, a technique prized for its flexibility with small samples and mixed orders of integration, meaning it can handle variables that are stationary, non-stationary, or a combination of both. By estimating both short-run dynamics and long-run equilibrium relationships within a single model, and by validating the results with unit root tests, bounds cointegration tests, and a battery of diagnostics including Breusch-Godfrey, White, and Ramsey RESET tests alongside CUSUM stability checks, the analysis provides unusually robust evidence for a single-country time series. The dependent variable is the female youth unemployment rate, defined as the share of the female labour force aged 15 to 24 without work but available for and seeking employment, which averaged a striking 51.52 percent over the study period, ranging from 44.77 to 69.79 percent.

Globalization itself was measured using the KOF index, disaggregated into economic, social, political, informational, interpersonal, cultural, financial, and trade dimensions, each calculated as the average of de facto and de jure components. This disaggregation is the study’s central innovation, because aggregate indices can mask sharply divergent effects. The model also controlled for foreign direct investment inflows, net migration, output volatility measured as the standard deviation of growth rates, fertility rates, and female education captured by the gender parity index, guarding against omitted variable bias and spurious correlation. Variance inflation factors confirmed that multicollinearity was not a problem, with no individual VIF exceeding 5.

The long-run results are sobering. A 1 percent increase in the overall globalization index was associated with a 0.26 percent increase in female youth unemployment, holding other factors constant. Disaggregated further, trade globalization exerted the largest effect, with a 1 percent increase linked to a 0.54 percent rise in female youth joblessness, followed by informational globalization at 0.50 percent, social globalization at 0.45 percent, interpersonal globalization at 0.34 percent, economic globalization at 0.29 percent, and political globalization at 0.22 percent. Only financial and cultural globalization broke the pattern, showing no significant long-run harm. These findings align with the skeptical school of globalization theory, which holds that the benefits of integration are overstated and unevenly distributed, and they echo prior evidence that South Africa’s rapid tariff reductions exposed labour-intensive manufacturing to cheaper imports without adequate support or reskilling for displaced workers.

The short-run picture, however, is strikingly different, and this temporal asymmetry is perhaps the study’s most policy-relevant insight. Financial globalization at its first lag reduced female youth unemployment by 0.08 percent for each 1 percent increase, plausibly by easing financial vulnerabilities and promoting inclusion. Interpersonal globalization, reflecting the growing interconnectedness of people through communication, travel, and migration, cut female youth unemployment by 0.22 percent per 1 percent increase. Political globalization showed the largest short-run benefit, with a 100 percent increase associated with a 19 percent reduction in female youth joblessness. These short-run gains support the hyperglobalist view that integration creates opportunities that would not otherwise exist, particularly for women seeking entry into formal labour markets.

The error correction models revealed that between 14 and 25 percent of any deviation from long-run equilibrium unemployment is corrected within a single year, indicating a reasonably fast adjustment process. But the study went further, testing for non-linearity by introducing squared globalization terms. The results uncovered a U-shaped relationship in the long run for the overall index as well as the social, informational, cultural, and political dimensions, meaning that globalization reduced female youth unemployment up to an optimal threshold, beyond which the effect turned harmful. The calculated thresholds were 40.37 for overall globalization, 38.55 for social, 39.08 for informational, and 45.88 for political globalization. Comparing these with 2022 values shows that every dimension except cultural globalization has already surpassed its threshold, suggesting South Africa has exhausted the employment benefits of these forms of integration and may now be experiencing their detrimental side, possibly through automation and competitive displacement of female workers.

The control variables added further nuance. Net migration and female education both increased female youth unemployment, the latter perhaps reflecting higher reservation wages among educated women, skills mismatches with available jobs, and rigid social norms that leave many qualified young women searching indefinitely. Fertility rates showed a negative association, likely because young motherhood curtails formal education and pushes women into the informal economy, where underemployment goes uncounted in official statistics. Foreign direct investment, contrary to expectations, raised long-run female youth unemployment, possibly due to capital-intensive investment patterns and the crowding out of female-dominated informal enterprises. GDP volatility increased unemployment in the short run, consistent with cyclical layoffs, but reduced it in the long run, a pattern the study attributes to creative destruction, as recessions eliminate inefficient firms and reallocate labour toward more productive ones, while women’s concentration in counter-cyclical sectors such as healthcare, education, and public administration shields them from the worst hiring-and-firing cycles.

The policy implications are pointed. Nnyanzi recommends embedding gender impact assessments into trade agreements so that liberalization does not devalue women’s labour, supporting women-owned enterprises through tax incentives and access to finance, and closing the gender digital divide by making internet connectivity and smart devices affordable for women, particularly in rural areas. He also calls for incentives encouraging women to use e-commerce and fintech platforms to reach global markets, alongside gender-sensitive strategies for cultural exchange and mobility. Because interpersonal, political, and financial globalization deliver short-run gains, the study argues that governments should deepen capital flow liberalization, strengthen international institutions, and foster information exchange, while remaining alert to the long-run thresholds at which these benefits reverse. The overarching message is that a one-size-fits-all approach to globalization policy will not stabilize South Africa’s labour market; only gender-responsive, dimension-specific, and time-aware interventions can convert global integration from a driver of female youth joblessness into a genuine engine of inclusive employment.

Subject of Research: The effects of globalization and its sub-dimensions on female youth unemployment in South Africa

Article Title: Exploring the female youth unemployment effects of globalization in South Africa using the standard ARDL approach

Article References: Nnyanzi, J. B. (2026). Exploring the female youth unemployment effects of globalization in South Africa using the standard ARDL approach. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 223. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00571-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00571-8

Keywords: globalization, female youth unemployment, South Africa, ARDL, KOF index, trade liberalization, NEET, threshold effects, labour market, gender inequality, foreign direct investment, economic policy

The study, published in Discover Agriculture, examines the structural drivers of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in Turkey from 1990 to 2021, a period spanning the country’s financial liberalization, deepening globalization, rapid technological investment, and expanding renewable energy capacity. Rather than treating agriculture in isolation, the authors model emissions as the outcome of an interconnected transformation process involving economic growth, financial development, renewable energy consumption, technological innovation, and globalization. Their central finding is striking: the relationship between income and agricultural emissions follows a U-shaped curve in the long term, not the classic inverted U-shape predicted by the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve has long underpinned policy optimism, holding that environmental degradation rises during early development but falls once societies grow wealthy enough to demand cleaner technologies and stronger regulation. The Turkish data tell a different story for agriculture. Below a turning point estimated at roughly 5,430 US dollars of per capita income in constant 2015 dollars, growth was associated with falling agricultural emissions, likely reflecting productivity gains and structural adjustment. But once that threshold was crossed, a milestone Turkey surpassed in the mid-1990s, further economic expansion became coupled with rising emissions, driven by intensifying food demand, mechanization, irrigation, livestock expansion, and heavier use of energy- and chemical-intensive inputs.

Methodologically, the study is notable for how it handles Turkey’s turbulent recent history. The 1994 currency crisis, the financial collapse of 2000 and 2001, and successive structural reforms all left marks on the country’s economic time series, and conventional unit root tests that ignore such breaks can produce misleading results. The authors therefore employed the fractional frequency Fourier Augmented Dickey-Fuller test, which uses sine and cosine functions to capture both sharp and gradual structural changes, alongside traditional ADF and Phillips-Perron tests. For the long-run estimates, they applied a Fourier-augmented autoregressive distributed lag approach, cross-checked with fully modified and canonical cointegrating regression estimators.

The Fourier components proved statistically significant, with an estimated fractional frequency of 2.42 indicating that the structural breaks embedded in Turkey’s development path are permanent rather than temporary. The error correction coefficient of -0.92 showed that short-term deviations from the long-run equilibrium are corrected rapidly, with roughly 92 percent of any imbalance eliminated within a single period. Diagnostic tests confirmed the absence of autocorrelation, heteroskedasticity, and model misspecification, and cumulative sum stability checks confirmed that the estimated coefficients remained stable across the sample.

Perhaps the most counterintuitive results concern renewable energy and technology. Both variables showed positive long-term relationships with agricultural emissions, meaning that the expansion of clean energy in the wider Turkish economy and the growth of patent activity have not translated into lower emissions from farming. The authors caution against reading these coefficients as direct causal effects. The renewable energy indicator measures the share of renewables in total final energy consumption economy-wide, not within agriculture, and total patent applications do not distinguish green or agricultural innovations from inventions in other sectors. The likely explanation is indirect: greater energy availability can stimulate irrigation, mechanization, processing, and land-use changes that expand production and offset emission savings.

Financial development told a similar story. According to the robustness estimates, a one percent increase in the financial development index was associated with approximately a 0.17 percent rise in agricultural emissions, suggesting that easier access to credit and a wider array of financial instruments fuel production expansion rather than environmental improvement. The finding aligns with a growing body of international evidence showing that finance, when not steered by environmental criteria, tends to amplify emission-intensive activity. The authors argue that this makes a case for green credit mechanisms and environmental quality conditions attached to agricultural lending.

Globalization emerged as the lone bright spot. In both the short and long term, increases in the KOF Globalization Index were associated with lower agricultural emissions, with the long-run coefficient implying that a one percent rise in globalization corresponds to roughly a one percent decline. The authors attribute this to the disciplining force of international markets: Turkey exports approximately half of its goods to European Union countries, whose emission standards and sustainability requirements push producers toward cleaner practices. Compliance with international environmental norms, they suggest, acts as a balancing factor that domestic growth dynamics alone fail to provide.

The broader implications reach well beyond Turkey. Roughly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions originate from agriculture and food systems, and with the world population projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, pressure on farmland, water, and inputs will only intensify. The Turkish results suggest that for developing economies, growth alone will not deliver a low-carbon agricultural transition, and that finance, energy, and technology policies must be explicitly aligned with emission reduction targets. The authors recommend carbon pricing in agriculture, incentives for low-emission production, precision agriculture support, green patent programs, and renewable energy projects that deliver measurable on-farm reductions, such as energy-efficient irrigation and low-carbon machinery.

The study’s authors are candid about its limitations. The model does not directly include biophysical determinants such as fertilizer application, livestock density, land-use change, or climate variability, so the estimated relationships should be read as long-run associations rather than definitive causal effects. The patent and renewable energy indicators capture economy-wide activity rather than sector-specific innovation. Future research, they suggest, could extend the sample back to 1980, incorporate regional and farm-level data, apply asymmetric estimators, or compare Turkey with structurally similar economies in the European Union. But the core message stands: without deliberate sustainability policies, the engines of modern development may reproduce, rather than resolve, agriculture’s climate problem.

Subject of Research: Structural economic drivers of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions in Turkey

Article Title: Rethinking agricultural sustainability in Turkey: structural drivers of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions

Article References: Özbek, S., & Özbek, B. (2026). Rethinking agricultural sustainability in Turkey: structural drivers of agricultural greenhouse gas emissions. Discover Agriculture, 4(1), Article 302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44279-026-00776-0

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44279-026-00776-0

Keywords: agricultural emissions, greenhouse gases, Environmental Kuznets Curve, Turkey, financial development, renewable energy, technological innovation, globalization, econometrics, sustainable agriculture, climate change, low-carbon transition

The paradox that motivates the analysis is stark. During the first Trump campaign, public attention focused on low-income families hit by de-industrialization and on middle-income households anxious about their status. Today the movement is openly endorsed by figures such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, whose company Meta donated one million dollars to Trump’s inauguration fund despite earlier personal disputes. PayPal founder Peter Thiel backed Trump from the start, and his association with J.D. Vance helped secure Vance’s path to the vice presidency. Elon Musk’s brief tenure at the head of the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency signaled that the agenda of some technology leaders extends beyond lower corporate taxes and deregulation. It reflects a conviction that the established administrative structures of the federal government should be dismantled to make room for radical innovation.

Yet the fiscal record cuts directly against the interests of the movement’s poorest supporters. The legislation nicknamed the Big Beautiful Bill cuts spending on Medicaid and the food assistance program SNAP by roughly 900 billion dollars through 2034, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates. The CBO’s distributional analysis shows that the bill’s tax cuts most benefit the highest income groups while the combined effect of tax and benefit changes is most damaging to the lowest deciles. Rural areas, where Medicaid dependence is high, will bear a disproportionate share of the losses, and rural voters form one of Trump’s most reliable constituencies. In counties where at least a quarter of voters’ personal income comes from government transfers, 63 percent cast their ballots for Trump in 2024. How can a movement simultaneously reward its wealthiest backers and strip benefits from the people who vote for it most loyally?

The demographic evidence deepens the puzzle rather than resolving it. Trump won those with a high school diploma or less by twenty points, and voters who attend religious services monthly or more often by thirty points, yet no single master variable explains the pattern. Gender, ethnicity, religion, education and place all interact: majorities of Black and Asian men backed Harris while most white and Hispanic men backed Trump; 63 percent of rural women voted for him, a 28-point margin. Income categories alone have limited explanatory power, with the lowest income tier split almost evenly, but the shift from 2020 is striking, as Biden’s 19-point advantage among the lowest earners collapsed to roughly one point for Harris. Glassmann’s conclusion is that rational-choice models of voting simply cannot account for behavior this resistant to material self-interest, and that ideology must be doing the work.

The intellectual core of the new ideology is a rejection of the economic theory that underpinned globalization. Classical trade theory, resting on David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage, holds that all nations gain when each specializes where it is relatively efficient, and that technologically leading economies would keep the high-end of the value chain while others supplied cheap labor. J.D. Vance, in a keynote at the a16z American Dynamism Summit, called this one of two great conceits of the globalization era. Because of network effects, he argued, partner economies inevitably climb into innovative, high-end production, turning economic collaboration into geopolitical rivalry. China, once dismissed as confined to labor-intensive sectors, expanded its share of world manufacturing value added sixfold between 1991 and 2012, from 4.1 to 24 percent, and now contests American technological leadership outright.

Vance’s second conceit is what he calls the hunger of Western economies for cheap labor. In this telling, Western firms were drugged by the promise that offshoring and low-wage competition would secure their competitiveness, so they stopped innovating and moved factories abroad instead. The empirical anchor here is the research on the China shock by David Autor, David Dorn and Gordon Hanson, which overturned the comfortable assumption that the aggregate labor-market effects of trade are negligible. Their work showed that competition from an unequally developed trading partner can impose severe, concentrated and persistent harm on specific regions and on the least educated workers, effectively creating enclaves of opposition to the global system inside democracies themselves. The steady growth of the American trade deficit since the 1970s, and its sharp acceleration after 2000, became the emblem of this failure, even though the United States retains a surplus in services trade and still leads the world in GDP.

What makes the doctrine genuinely unifying is its answer to the question of what should replace redistribution. Vance accuses Democrats of offering nothing but welfare substitutes to communities hollowed out by de-industrialization, a compassion, in his words, devoid of any expectation that reeked of giving up. Labor-market research supports the intuition behind this critique: psychological studies find that low-paid workers often fare better than the unemployed, suggesting that a sense of purpose, not just income, is decisive for well-being. The MAGA movement addresses this deficit existentially and even religiously, promising that radical reindustrialization and a national mission will restore meaning to lives that welfare checks could not. This is why, in Glassmann’s account, the ideology can override short-term material interests: it offers fulfillment of those interests the way a religious narrative offers paradise, deferred and conditional on collective struggle.

The religious register is not metaphorical. In a 2020 essay in the Catholic journal The Lamp, Vance described his conversion from atheist Yale law student to conservative Catholic, criticizing an elite culture obsessed with achievement but silent about the ultimate purpose of education. The pivotal encounter was a 2011 lecture by Peter Thiel, who linked the hyper-competitive misery of elite professionals to the technological stagnation of society at large. Thiel’s famous claim that America has stopped innovating sits oddly beside scholarship celebrating the knowledge economy, but it performs crucial ideological work: it tells both the displaced factory worker and the overworked engineer that they are losers of the same failed order. From this view, questions such as sustainable energy supply are not distributional problems but questions of civilizational survival, and therefore beyond the reach of ordinary redistributive politics.

That framing carries radical institutional consequences. If the existing state structures have blocked the necessary transformation, the argument runs, they are illegitimate and must be swept away; if multilateral institutions constrain national supremacy, they must be abandoned. Glassmann traces the philosophical machinery to Thiel’s adoption, through René Girard’s lectures at Stanford, of the concept of mimetic desire, the unconscious imitation of others’ wants, which Girard believed breeds envy and violence in groups. On this reading, liberal democracy’s promise of equality fuels destructive competition, so liberalism itself must give way to a techno-nationalist ideology wrapped in religious fervor. The result, Glassmann warns, is a strategy of conformity, or Gleichschaltung, extending through media, universities and courts, a drift toward competitive authoritarianism, withdrawal from international organizations, and unilateralism in a multipolar world, with the separation of powers itself under strain.

The article closes with an explicitly historical warning, invoking Hannah Arendt’s observation that the intellectuals who engaged with Nazi ideology were dangerous because they really believed in it, and Leo Strauss’s definition of nihilism as the desire to destroy modern civilization. Glassmann calls the present a Weimar moment, not because dictatorship is inevitable, but because the current administration has both the will and, increasingly, the capacity to overturn the constitutional order. Whether the coalition holds is an open question: inflation and growth problems caused by tariffs and investor uncertainty will test whether welfare-dependent voters continue to endorse policies that enrich tech billionaires. But the central lesson for scholars and for international actors is clear. Trumpism is not an incoherent tantrum of globalization’s losers. It is a coherent, thick, nationalist ideology, engineered to reconcile the interests of the very rich and the very poor around a global technology race, and it must be understood on those terms before its assumptions can be effectively contested.

Subject of Research: The ideological and economic foundations uniting low-income and elite supporters of the MAGA movement in the United States

Article Title: Understanding the political and economic thought of Trumpism: why have impoverished workers and wealthy technological elites in the U.S. adopted a shared ideology?

Article References: Glassmann, U. (2025). Understanding the political and economic thought of Trumpism: why have impoverished workers and wealthy technological elites in the U.S. adopted a shared ideology?. Global Public Policy and Governance, 5(4), 367-379. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-025-00137-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43508-025-00137-5

Keywords: Trumpism, populism, political ideology, globalization, China shock, comparative advantage, J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, welfare policy, competitive authoritarianism, reindustrialization

The original research, authored by Daniel Balsalobre-Lorente of the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain, Oana M. Driha of the University of Alicante, Muhammad Shahbaz, then affiliated with the Beijing Institute of Technology and COMSATS University Islamabad, and Avik Sinha of the Goa Institute of Management, addressed one of the most actively debated questions in environmental economics. The study sought to quantify how the expansion of international tourism, combined with the deepening of economic, political and social globalization, affects measures of environmental degradation across a panel of developed economies. Research in this area typically employs econometric techniques to disentangle the competing effects of tourism-driven growth, trade openness and institutional integration on carbon emissions and related environmental indicators, and the paper had become part of a substantial body of literature informing policy discussions about sustainable tourism and climate mitigation in advanced economies.

Retractions of this kind are rare relative to the total volume of published research, but they play a critical role in the self-correcting machinery of science. When an editor retracts a paper because peer review appears compromised, the implication is that the manuscript may not have received the independent expert scrutiny that journals promise, raising the possibility that the paper’s route to publication was engineered or manipulated rather than earned on scientific merit. In such cases the retraction does not necessarily assert that the findings are wrong. Instead, it signals that the provenance of the publication can no longer be trusted, which in practice means that the scientific community should treat the article’s conclusions as unverified. The distinction matters, because findings can sometimes be independently reproduced even when the publication process itself was tainted.

Notably, the retraction notice records that the authors disagree with the decision. This disagreement places the case within a familiar and contentious category of research integrity disputes, in which publishers act to protect the record while authors maintain that their work stands on its own evidentiary foundations. Author objections to retractions are not unusual, and journals generally proceed with retraction when the evidence of compromised process is sufficiently serious, while noting the authors’ position in the public notice. The published record of the retraction is itself a document of the scientific process: it does not accuse the authors of wrongdoing, nor does it detail the specific mechanism by which the peer review is alleged to have been compromised, but it makes clear that the concerns surfaced after publication and were judged serious enough to warrant full withdrawal of the article.

The case sheds light on the broader structural pressures confronting academic publishing. Peer review is a voluntary, labor-intensive system in which busy researchers evaluate manuscripts for free, and journals with high submission volumes and rapid publication schedules have historically struggled to verify the identities and independence of reviewers. Compromised peer review can take several forms, including review reports submitted by authors themselves under fabricated or coerced reviewer identities, colluding reviewer rings that approve one another’s manuscripts, and email accounts registered to review on behalf of real researchers without their knowledge. Publishers have responded over the past decade with tighter verification of reviewer identities, stricter use of institutional email addresses, and automated screening of submission metadata, but determined actors have repeatedly found new workarounds, and post-publication detection has become an essential line of defense.

For environmental science specifically, the integrity problem carries particular weight because the field feeds directly into policy. Studies on tourism and environmental degradation inform decisions by governments and international organizations about sustainable tourism strategies, carbon pricing, transport policy and the design of climate commitments. When a paper on these topics is retracted, citing authors are expected to remove it from the evidentiary basis of their own work or at minimum flag its retracted status. Meta-analyses and literature reviews that incorporated the study’s estimates may need to be revisited. Citation databases including Scopus and Web of Science flag retracted articles, and many journals now use automated screening to catch citations of retracted work before publication, though the lag between retraction and the correction of the citation record can stretch over years.

The retracted article’s topic also illustrates why such studies attract intense scrutiny. The relationship between globalization and the environment is empirically complex. Economic globalization can accelerate emissions by expanding trade, aviation and energy-intensive production, but it can also diffuse cleaner technologies and environmental standards across borders. Tourism generates transport emissions and local environmental pressure, yet tourism revenue can fund conservation and shift economies away from heavier industry. Disentangling these channels requires careful panel econometrics, typically involving tests for cross-sectional dependence, unit roots in panel data, and estimation methods robust to heterogeneity across countries, such as panel quantile regression or common correlated effects approaches. Any credible contribution to this literature must defend not only its data sources but the rigor of its econometric identification, which is precisely the kind of judgment that independent peer review exists to provide.

The retraction notice was published on 22 September 2026, nearly seven years after the original article appeared online in late December 2019. That interval is characteristic of how post-publication concerns unfold in practice. Investigations into compromised peer review routinely take years, involving correspondence between the journal, the publisher’s research integrity group, the authors’ institutions, and sometimes external forensic analysts. Publishers must weigh the reputational and legal risks of retraction against the harm caused by leaving a compromised paper in the literature, and institutional investigations can proceed slowly, particularly when authors are affiliated with universities in multiple countries, as is the case here, with institutions in Spain, China, Pakistan and India represented among the author list. The multi-country authorship underscores the increasingly international character of environmental economics research and the correspondingly international character of the oversight challenges it faces.

Springer Nature, the publisher of Environmental Science and Pollution Research, follows the retraction guidelines issued by the Committee on Publication Ethics, which recommend that retraction notices be clearly linked to the retracted article, state who is retracting and why, and remain permanently attached to the record. In line with that practice, the retracted article remains accessible online but is now watermarked and linked to the retraction notice, so that any reader or indexing service encountering the paper will immediately see its withdrawn status. The journal, a leading venue in environmental pollution and sustainability research, publishes hundreds of articles annually, and its editors have carried out multiple retractions in recent years as part of wider publisher-led integrity sweeps affecting papers with compromised review trails.

For researchers, the lesson of this case is twofold. First, the credibility of an empirical result depends on more than the elegance of its modeling; it depends on an intact chain of independent verification, and a broken link anywhere in that chain can unravel the entire publication. Second, the scientific community’s response to integrity failures is increasingly systematic rather than ad hoc: flagged papers are investigated, notices are standardized, citations are tracked, and retractions, once stigmatizing rarities, are now understood as a necessary instrument for maintaining the reliability of the literature. Readers and policymakers consulting research on tourism, globalization and environmental degradation should therefore check the current status of any study they rely upon, and treat retraction notices not as an ending but as an important form of scientific communication in their own right.

Subject of Research: Retraction of a study on the effects of tourism and globalization on environmental degradation in developed countries due to compromised peer review

Article Title: Retraction Note: The effects of tourism and globalization over environmental degradation in developed countries

Article References: Balsalobre-Lorente, D., Driha, O. M., Shahbaz, M., & Sinha, A. (2026). Retraction Note: The effects of tourism and globalization over environmental degradation in developed countries. Environmental Science and Pollution Research. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-026-38249-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11356-026-38249-y

Keywords: retraction, peer review, environmental degradation, tourism, globalization, Environmental Science and Pollution Research, research integrity, Springer Nature, developed countries, environmental economics, carbon emissions, publication ethics

The choice of countries is not incidental. The New BRICS grouping spans continents, political systems, resource endowments and stages of development, from hydrocarbon-rich monarchies of the Persian Gulf to densely populated agrarian economies undergoing rapid industrial transformation. What unites them is their weight in the global economy and their outsized role in determining whether international sustainability targets can be met at all. If these eleven economies cannot translate growth into sustainable outcomes, the argument runs, global progress stalls regardless of what happens in the OECD. That makes them an ideal laboratory for testing whether the drivers of sustainability identified in wealthy, institutionally mature countries also hold in contexts marked by weaker institutions, informal labor markets and uneven access to education and health care.

Methodologically, the study is notable for the care with which it handles the statistical quirks of panel data. The authors begin with the PANIC Fourier unit root test developed by Nazlioglu and colleagues, a procedure that allows for smooth structural breaks in the time series—wars, financial crises, pandemics, commodity price shocks—that would otherwise distort tests of statistical properties. Standard unit root tests assume any breaks are abrupt; the Fourier approach approximates gradual, evolving shifts with trigonometric functions, yielding more reliable conclusions about whether variables such as income, energy use or globalization indices are stationary. Establishing the integration properties of each series is a prerequisite for everything that follows, because spurious regression is the perennial hazard of macro-panel work.

With those foundations in place, the researchers turned to the panel cointegration test proposed by Westerlund and Edgerton, which asks whether the variables move together over the long run—whether, in other words, there is a genuine equilibrium relationship linking economic growth, renewable energy consumption, globalization, human development and the Sustainable Development Index, rather than a coincidental correlation. The test confirmed such a long-run relationship across the panel, licensing the next step: estimating the size and sign of each driver’s effect. For that, the authors employed the Augmented Mean Group estimator, a technique that allows each country to have its own slope coefficients while pooling information across the panel, and that remains robust to cross-sectional dependence—the fact that shocks in China or Saudi Arabia ripple into neighboring economies through trade, finance and energy markets.

The headline results are strikingly clear-cut. Human development, typically measured through the Human Development Index combining income, education and life expectancy, carries a statistically significant and positive effect on sustainable development. So does renewable energy consumption: the more of a country’s energy mix comes from renewable sources, the higher its Sustainable Development Index score tends to be. Both findings align with the theoretical expectation that sustainability is built on human capabilities and clean energy rather than on raw output alone. Investments in schooling, public health and productive employment, the results suggest, are not social expenditures competing with sustainability goals—they are among the most direct routes to achieving them.

The globalization result is the study’s most provocative contribution. Across the eleven-country panel, deeper global integration is associated with a statistically significant decline in the Sustainable Development Index. The authors are careful about interpretation: globalization itself is not inherently harmful, but in economies lacking inclusive institutions, resilient economic structures and capability-enhancing policies, integration can generate sustainability vulnerabilities. Export-oriented extractive industries, carbon-intensive manufacturing relocated from regulated economies, volatile capital flows and competition-driven regulatory loosening are among the mechanisms by which opening up can erode environmental and social gains. The finding complicates the long-standing assumption, common in earlier empirical work, that trade openness and financial integration are unambiguously good for development outcomes in emerging markets.

Equally notable is what the study implies about economic growth itself. While growth remains the variable most often celebrated in development policy, the results indicate that growth alone does not reliably deliver sustainability in the New BRICS context. A rising GDP can coexist with deteriorating environmental quality, widening inequality and stagnant human capabilities, particularly when the growth is concentrated in extractive or carbon-intensive sectors. The Sustainable Development Index, by design, penalizes development strategies that achieve human wellbeing at excessive ecological cost, and the panel evidence suggests that many of these economies have yet to decouple wellbeing gains from environmental degradation. The policy implication is a shift of emphasis: from maximizing output to investing deliberately in the human and energy foundations of durable progress.

The renewable energy finding carries particular urgency given the composition of the panel. Several of these countries are among the world’s largest fossil fuel producers and consumers, and several others are only beginning to build renewable capacity at scale. Yet the statistical evidence indicates that every expansion of renewable consumption is associated with measurable sustainability gains, controlling for the other drivers. For oil- and gas-dependent states such as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia and the United Arab Emirates, the result underscores the economic case for diversification into solar and other renewables—not merely as a hedge against future demand shifts, but as a present-day contributor to sustainable development outcomes. For India, Indonesia, Egypt and Ethiopia, it strengthens the argument that renewable infrastructure deserves priority in development finance.

The authors frame their conclusions as a call for human-centered and sustainability-oriented development strategies. Rather than relying solely on economic growth, policymakers in emerging economies should prioritize investments in human development, accelerate the renewable energy transition, and build the institutional mechanisms capable of converting global integration from a source of vulnerability into a channel for inclusive, sustainable outcomes. That last point is subtle but important: the study does not recommend retreat from the world economy, which is neither realistic nor necessarily desirable, but rather the domestic prerequisites—education, health, strong regulatory institutions, resilient industrial structures—that determine whether integration helps or harms. Globalization, on this reading, is an amplifier: it magnifies the strengths and the weaknesses of the societies it connects.

For the broader research community, the study demonstrates the value of methods that respect the messiness of real-world macro data—structural breaks, cross-country spillovers, parameter heterogeneity—rather than forcing emerging economies into statistical frameworks calibrated on advanced economies. And for the growing family of BRICS-plus nations, it provides an evidence base for a policy conversation that is already underway, as member states debate green industrial policy, development finance and the governance of energy transitions. The eleven economies studied here will account for a decisive share of global emissions and population in the coming decades. If the study’s central message is right, the fastest route to global sustainability may run not through aggregate growth targets, but through schools, hospitals, and solar farms.

Subject of Research: Drivers of sustainable development in New BRICS economies

Article Title: Human development renewable energy and globalization as drivers of sustainable development in new BRICS economies

Article References: Şahin, S., Özbek, B., & Özbek, S. (2026). Human development renewable energy and globalization as drivers of sustainable development in new BRICS economies. Discover Sustainability. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43621-026-04524-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43621-026-04524-8

Keywords: sustainable development, BRICS, human development index, renewable energy, globalization, economic growth, panel cointegration, Augmented Mean Group estimator, emerging economies, energy transition, Discover Sustainability, development policy

The finding arrives as the global trading system becomes increasingly dependent on overlapping networks of regional agreements. By 2023, more than 356 regional trade agreements were in force, while the World Trade Organization had received more than 585 notifications related to such arrangements. These agreements include free-trade areas, customs unions and other preferential frameworks that reduce tariffs or establish common rules among participating economies. Their effects are not uniform. The terms of each agreement, the sectors it covers, the products exchanged and the economic characteristics of its members can all shape the outcome. Some agreements may rapidly increase trade in manufactured goods, while others may affect agriculture, services or transportation only after years of adjustment.

The central statistical challenge is timing. Regional trade agreements rarely begin affecting commerce on a single, clean date. Negotiations may influence firms before a treaty formally enters into force, while tariff reductions and regulatory changes can be phased in over many years. Countries may also join different agreements at different moments, and some agreements eventually expire or are replaced. This staggered pattern makes it difficult to compare countries fairly. A simple before-and-after calculation can confuse the effect of an agreement with unrelated changes in economic growth, exchange rates, wars, financial crises or shifts in global demand. The economists therefore applied recent advances in difference-in-differences estimation, a family of methods used to compare changes over time between units exposed to a policy and units that are not.

Traditional difference-in-differences models often rely on two-way fixed effects. In a typical application, country-pair observations are adjusted for persistent differences between pairs and for shocks affecting all countries in a given year. The approach can be useful, but it becomes problematic when treatment effects vary across countries or over time. Under staggered adoption, a country pair treated early may inadvertently serve as a comparison group for a pair treated later, even though the earlier agreement is already influencing trade. If the effects grow or shrink over time, the resulting estimate can blend together distinct phases of the policy response and, in some circumstances, give misleading weights to different treatment cohorts.

Abreha and Robertson’s design explicitly accommodates these complications. Their study uses bilateral trade data covering more than 200 countries from 1962 through 2020, drawn from the Centre d’Études Prospectives et d’Informations Internationales, or CEPII. The long time span allows the researchers to observe trade relationships well before agreements are introduced and for many years afterward. The wide country coverage also extends the analysis beyond the narrower samples common in earlier work. Rather than treating an agreement’s influence as identical immediately after implementation and a decade later, the model permits dynamic effects that can vary with time since adoption. That distinction is crucial because companies may need years to redirect supply chains, establish distribution networks, meet new standards or develop relationships with customers abroad.

The resulting pattern is one of gradual expansion rather than an instant trade surge. The estimated effect grows during the years following implementation and reaches approximately 25 to 30 percent after ten years. This estimate is larger than the effect obtained from standard two-way fixed-effects models, indicating that conventional specifications may understate the longer-term consequences of trade agreements when they fail to represent staggered adoption and changing treatment effects. The result does not mean that every agreement produces the same increase, nor that the agreement alone explains every change in commerce. Instead, it represents an average estimated response across a broad and historically diverse set of bilateral relationships, under the assumptions built into the researchers’ econometric framework.

One especially important feature of the analysis is its treatment of anticipation. Trade policy can influence behavior before the legal implementation date. Firms may begin investing, signing contracts or shifting sourcing plans after an agreement is announced but before tariffs or other provisions formally change. Importers and exporters may also adjust inventories in expectation of future rules. If researchers mark the policy’s beginning only at the enforcement date, some of the genuine response may already have occurred and could be incorrectly assigned to the pre-treatment period. Abreha and Robertson find that accounting for anticipation changes the estimated timing, magnitude and statistical significance of the dynamic trade response. The result reinforces the idea that economic policies have calendars more complicated than a single legal start date.

The paper also expands the scope of the evidence beyond manufacturing, incorporates agreements that can expire and uses a lagged dependent-variable specification as an alternative way to address the persistence of trade relationships. Bilateral commerce is highly durable: countries that trade extensively in one period are likely to continue doing so in the next because firms have already built logistics networks, established suppliers and learned how to navigate one another’s markets. A lagged dependent variable captures part of that persistence, although it also introduces additional identifying assumptions that must be considered when interpreting the estimates. By examining non-absorbing treatments—agreements that do not remain permanently active—the study reflects the fact that international policy arrangements can end, change status or be superseded.

The award committee selected the article from eligible papers published in the journal during 2025, including papers rated in the top quarter or better during the review process. The committee was chaired by N. Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University and included members of the Atlantic Economic Journal’s editorial board and sponsors of the International Atlantic Economic Society Endowment Fund. The recognition highlights not only the headline estimate but also the methodological problem behind it: trade agreements are complex interventions whose effects may vary by country, sector and time. The authors acknowledge important boundaries to their conclusions. Their study does not examine cases in which agreements create entirely new trading relationships, and it does not separately account for individual provisions such as intellectual-property protections or regulatory rules. Those details could explain why some agreements generate stronger effects than others. Even so, the analysis offers a more technically realistic picture of how trade policy reshapes the global economy—slowly, unevenly and often beginning before the paperwork says it has started.