Mohammad Mafizur Rahman

• PhD
• Associate Professor of Economics at University of Southern Queensland

Background Obesity among children and adolescents is a significant public health concern, influenced by a complex interplay of biological and behavioral factors. However, the extent to which these factors contribute to socioeconomic disparities in obesity remains inadequately understood. Therefore, this study aimed to elucidate the roles of behavio...

The material footprint (MFP) is a critical issue due to the pressure on natural resources, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and increased greenhouse gas emissions. In the existing literature, the determinants and their impacts on the MFP of G7 countries have not been sufficiently examined. The aim of this study is to analyze the effect...

Background Diarrheal infections continue to be a major public health concern in Bangladesh, especially in urban areas where population density and environmental variables increase dissemination risks. Identifying the intricate connections between weather variables and diarrhea epidemics is critical for developing effective public health remedies....

Background Understanding the association between socioeconomic inequalities and health behaviors is imperative for elucidating and effectively addressing health inequities among children and adolescents. Despite the wealth of literature on social gradients in health behaviors, longitudinal analyses of socioeconomic inequalities in the health behavi...

Background: Dietary habits are pivotal for population health and well-being, yet remain a pressing global issue, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), where economic instability and institutional challenges exacerbate dietary problems. Despite extensive research, there is a notable gap in the literature regarding the direct and interactive effe...

It is crucial to evaluate the link between financial development and environmental quality in order to meet the environmental sustainability goals. Therefore, this scholarly work seeks to validate the of an inverted U-shaped relationship between financial development and environmental quality in Australia, which modifies the conventional theory of...

Background Low birth weight is recognized as a pivotal risk factor affecting child survival and growth. Although Bangladesh has made commendable progress in public health, an infant mortality rate of 38 per 1000 live births and a 16% prevalence of low birth weight remain significant concerns compared to other developing countries. This situation po...

The relationship between human development and environmental quality has been explored in this study by examining the human-development status and carbon (CO2)-emissions levels of 60 countries from the low, lower-middle, and upper-middle income categories. The roles of renewable energy and some economic and institutional factors such as GDP, the ru...

Governments worldwide implemented various fiscal and monetary measures to address the adverse impacts of COVID-19 on their economies. The paper aims to examine the changes in the monetary policy measures due to COVID-19 and their impact on macroeconomic variables. To explore this relationship, this study utilizes fortnightly data from 2020 to 2023...

This study aims to examine the emerging Environmental Phillips-Curve (EPC) hypothesis across G7 nations from 1990 to 2022, employing the cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lags (CS-ARDL), wavelet coherence, and wavelet causality techniques. CS-ARDL analysis reveals negative impacts of the unemployment rate on CO2e, with economic...

The escalating phenomenon of environmental degradation is an urgent global concern, imperiling ecosystems and hindering the prospects for sustainable development on a planetary scale. Therefore, this study aims to explore the intricate interplay between renewable energy (RE) and ecological footprint (EF), considering the conditional impact of fisca...

This study explores the effects of war on human resource development in Afghanistan using non-linear autoregressive distributed lags (NARDL) and asymmetric causality analysis. The results of the NARDL bound test support an asymmetric long-run relationship between predictors. It reveals that positive and negative shocks from the per capita cost of w...

Air pollution poses a persuasive threat to global health, demonstrating widespread detrimental effects on populations worldwide. Exposure to pollutants, notably particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5 µm (PM2.5), has been unequivocally linked to a spectrum of adverse health outcomes. A nuanced understanding of the relationship between them is cru...

The Australian agricultural sector is of high importance as a predominant contributor to GDP and export earnings. However, rapid global warming and climate change may pose obstacles to agricultural exports. Existing literature shows that the issue is not receiving enough attention from policymakers, researchers, and academicians as it should. There...

Background Food insecurity and environmental degradation pose significant threats to health outcomes in South Asia, necessitating effective policy interventions. Therefore, this study aims to examine the impact of food insecurity and environmental degradation on health outcome indicators amidst global inflationary shocks and institutional quality a...

The integration of Green Logistics (GL) and Circular Economy (CE) have been recognized as critical concepts for achieving sustainable economic and environmental performance. However, there is a lack of understanding on the combine impacts of CE and GL in alleviating CO2 emissions in pioneering nations relying on these concepts. This study examines...

Prior literature is substantive in highlighting the nexus between pollutant and socio-economic predictors; however, the role of human interaction has not been sufficiently explored. Thus, the present study examines the validity of the environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis in the presence of energy consumption, overpopulation, and human capit...

Background Socioeconomic inequalities in health and their determinants have been studied extensively over the past few decades. However, the role of parenting style and parents’ couple relationships in explaining mental health inequalities is limited. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the distributional impact of parenting style (angry pare...

The war in Afghanistan left significantly negative consequences in all spheres of its society, leading the country to the highest levels of poverty, hunger, and environmental damage. This study explores the long-run impact of civil wars on environmental degradation in Afghanistan using the conceptual framework of the Environmental Kuznets Curve and...

The necessity of transitioning from the fossil fuels era to a green economy based on renewable energy resources has become increasingly urgent. This is in order to minimize the impact of energy supply fluctuations and combat global warming, especially in the wake of the recent oil price shock due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The present stud...

Financial development is vital to enhance the inclusive growth of a country in the modern world, and environmental quality, affected by financial development, is also a highly debated topic. Thus, this study attempts to investigate the role of financial development in determining environmental quality in Sri Lanka considering other variables namely...

Link between environmental degradation and agricultural trade balance (ATB) is an under investigated issue. This article, therefore, investigates the issue for Australia using the data of 1988–2021. In this investigation when a linear model is applied, support for short‐run impact is revealed. However, linear model is unable to explore the asymmetr...

Background This study raises two key arguments: First, government health expenditure (GHE) and per capita out-of-pocket expenditures on healthcare (OPEH) are sensitive to contemporary good governance practices, giving policy importance to the exogeneity of healthcare determinants, i.e., governance for health rather than health governance. Second, i...

High population, energy consumption, industrialization, and environmental degradation are inherently linked, making the study of ecological footprints in the most populous countries crucial for understanding their environmental impact and guiding efforts to minimize ecological degradation through sustainable resource management and conservation. Th...

Studying the effect of financial development on environmental quality has become imperative in the modern world due to the climate change challenges. Hence, this systematic literature review provides a comprehensive overview of the existing body of knowledge on the nexus of financial development and environmental quality in developed countries. Thr...

Socioeconomic status affects individuals’ health behaviors and contributes to a complex relationship between health and development. Due to this complexity, the relationship between SES and health behaviors is not yet fully understood. This literature review, therefore, aims to assess the association between socioeconomic status and health behavior...

The Sub-Saharan Africa is facing trilemma of energy poverty, climate change hazards, and low economic growth. Lack of access to modern energy is considered as an impediment to the region's wellbeing and development objectives. This study contributes to the energy literature by examining the role of financial development, institutional quality, fore...

Sustainable environmental quality is a global concern, and a concrete remedy to overcome this challenge is a policy priority. Therefore, this study delves into the subject and examines the effects of governance on environmental quality in 180 countries from 1999 to 2021. To maintain comparability and precision, we first classify countries into full...

Due to the ecological impacts of fossil energy, renewable energy has become crucial for inclusion in the energy supply to realize a sustainable environment, enhance public welfare, and combat global climate change. However, the transition to renewable energy and eco-sustainability is hampered by certain factors, such as uncertainties in economic po...

Financial development is vital to enhance the inclusive growth of a country in the modern world, and environmental quality, affected by financial development, is also a highly debated topic. Thus, this study attempts to investigate the role of financial development in determining environmental quality in Sri Lanka considering other variables namely...

Even though China has mapped out different policies targeting the mitigation of its environmental degradation, the country still occupies the 1st position in the ranking of carbon emissions due to excessive utilization of non-renewable energy sources in its domestic economic activities. From a theoretical and empirical point of view, factors like e...

Purpose: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic imposes serious short-term and long-term health costs on populations. Restrictive government policy measures decrease the risks of infection, but produce similarly serious social, mental health, and economic problems. Citizens have varying preferences about the desirability of restrictive policies, and govern...

The rapid rise in the globalization of production processes, knowledge spillovers, grave environmental concerns, and sustainable development goals have attracted researchers and policymakers to explore the causes and consequences of these transformations. The developing countries such as The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC)...

Using World Bank and IMF data over the period 1990–2018, this research explores the determinants of economic growth in Bangladesh with particular attention to environmental degradation and export concentration variables. An ARDL (Autoregressive Distributed Lag) bound testing approach is employed as an estimation strategy with FMOLS (Fully Modified...

This article aims to uncover the asymmetric labor-market consequences of the long-run civil war in Afghanistan by employing a non-linear autoregressive distributed lags (NARDL) model and an asymmetric causality technique over the period from 2004Q3 to 2020Q4. The findings from the NARDL model reveal that the positive asymmetric shocks from the cost...

Background Food insecurity indicates the difficulty of constantly obtaining adequate food because of limited economic resources. Food insecurity challenges the desired health outcomes. Although extensive literature has examined the associations between food security and health, low-wage informal sector workers have been less frequently addressed in...

The present study aims to assess the prospects for cleaner production (CP) and sustainable development (SD) of informally operated small manufacturing enterprises, which are frequently blamed for uncontrolled waste disposal and causing pollution to the environment. The economic efficiency level of these firms has been explored to this end, and the...

Electricity consumption and government policy are two vital elements for economic growth. Thus, this study explores the roles of electricity use and government policy in the economic growth of the selected four South Asian countries over the period from 1980 to 2014. The study includes the government policy variable in the extended Cobb–Douglas pro...

This study examines the effects of long-run civil wars on healthcare, which is an important component of human capital development and their causality nexus in Afghanistan using the MVAR (modified vector autoregressive) approach and the Granger non-causality model covering data period 2002Q3-2020Q4. The primary results support a significant long-ru...

Liquidated damages mechanisms have been analyzed from a legal perspective and applied to real-world contracts. Due to the lack of application of LDs to common agency theory, this research explores whether the liquidated damages mechanism can resolve principal-principal conflicts under common agency. We combine the moral hazard model of common agenc...

This study attempts to identify the role of corruption along with technological innovation, globalisation, renewable energy, and economic growth on CO2 emissions in Asian countries using the panel data for 1960–2020. Driscoll and Kraay's standard error technique and Panel Corrected Standard Error (PCSE) model have been applied for empirical estimat...

In the 22 well-developed countries of the world, the level of CO2 emissions has been reducing over the years despite positive economic growth. This study therefore attempts to explore the role of contributory factors for CO2 emissions reduction in these countries. Selecting the data period of 1990–2018, our chosen independent variables are gross do...

Air pollution is considered by many researchers to be one of the causes of global warming, with detrimental effects on the environment, economy, and society. Therefore, identifying the roles of some possible factors for air pollution is an important research agenda. To this end, using unbalanced panel data, this study endeavours to explore the role...

Purpose – Based on the fact that punishment and subsidy mechanisms affect the anti-epidemic incentives of major participants in a society, the issue of this paper is how the penalty and subsidy mechanisms affect the decisions of governments, businesses, and consumers during Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). Design/Methodology/approach - This p...

The understanding of the role of informal employment in economic growth is important to facilitate developing countries in safeguarding the decent work, productive employment, and inclusive growth agenda mentioned in Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 8. The present study attempts to this end by investigating the role of informal employment on eco...

Purpose A systematic, PRISMA-guided literature review was conducted using four databases (ProQuest, PubMed, EconLit and Scopus) to analyze research published between February 2020 and August 2021. This review included 31 studies out of 1,248 that were identified. Design/methodology/approach In addition to the serious health issues it causes, sever...

Background: Despite the high rate of teenage pregnancy in Nigeria and host of negative medical, social and economic consequences that are associated with the problem, relatively few studies have examined socioeconomic inequality in teenage pregnancy. Understanding the key factors associated with socioeconomic inequality in teenage pregnancy is ess...

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted all sectors of the tourism industry, particularly air transportation. However, air transport remains an important contributor to economic growth globally. Thus, this study examines whether air transport (a proxy for tourism) stimulates economic growth to validate the air-transportation-led growth hypothesis (ALGH)...

Climate change is an increasingly serious problem, resulting in significant environmental degradation, and various policies and regulations have been adopted to achieve zero-carbon with the goal of ameliorating this issue. To end this, along with economic growth, governments should consider human activities such as tourism and energy consumption, w...

The global warming phenomenon has become an international issue which requires effort to avoid and control the concentration of greenhouse gases (GHGs). At the same time, despite various attempts, developed countries need to put more effort and attention into dealing with this issue. Many studies have been conducted on reducing GHGs globally and na...

Background The outbreak of COVID-19 has alerted governments around the world, including Australia, to think seriously about the health issues. Life expectancy is one of such issues. Therefore, this study tries to reveal the effects of globalization, energy consumption, information and communication technology, financial development, education rate,...

This study explores the war-growth nexus in Afghanistan, a country where war-torn acts inform resource allocation. Employing the asymmetric ARDL, dynamic multipliers, and asymmetric causality techniques, the initial results confirm the existence of a long-run asymmetric nexus amid predictors. The asymmetric ARDL results indicate that a positive asy...

In this paper, we have examined the effects of COVID-19 on the socio-economic condition of the three-wheeled electric vehicle drivers in some selected areas of Bangladesh from the cross-sectional data (September–November 2020). The results of linear regression indicate that under COVID-19 conditions, age (p = 0.022) and hardship (p = 0.000) positiv...

Workers’ living standards have recently deteriorated in the service sector throughout the world, although a few decades ago, service was among the fastest growing sectors in industrialised nations. However, in recent years, in service sectors tourism especially has been drying up. This paper examines the symmetric and asymmetric effects of tourism,...

Most developing economies have recently experienced significant economic growth without corresponding substantial poverty reduction and improved population wellbeing. This paper uses a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag model to explore the growth-poverty relationship in Tanzania using annual time series data on per capita consumption expendi...

Background Despite the declining trends worldwide, infant and child mortality rates are still high in many African countries. These high rates are problematic; therefore, this study attempts to explore the contributing factors that cause high infant and child mortality rates in 14 African countries using panel data for the period of 2000–2018. In p...

This study aims to explore the impact of the informal sector on the sustainability of development. A large panel data set of 50 developing countries that spans over 2010–2019 has been utilized to this end while the informal sector is evaluated in terms of working poverty. Selecting indicators from three dimensions of sustainability, that is, econom...

This paper explores the impacts of informal economic activities and institutional capacity, particularly, corruption control on the environmental quality degradation of emerging economies under the prevailing socio-economic conditions and energy use patterns of the countries. The study utilizes key environmental degradation indicators: Carbon dioxi...

Environmental pollution is a principal concern for all countries. In particular, the issue is alarming for Australia as the country has been suffering from various environmental disasters for some recent years. Therefore, examination the roles of some variables that are related to environment are vital. To this end, this work endeavors to ascertain...

Tourism growth is an important component for welfare improvement in the host destination, but it can be associated with environmental degradation. The aim of the current study is to assess the environmental impacts of tourism growth in Tanzania, using time series data for the period 1995 – 2017. It utilizes ecological footprints as a proxy for envi...

Despite a substantial decline in child mortality globally, the high rate of under-five mortality in Nigeria is still one of the main public health concerns. This study investigates inequalities in geographic and socioeconomic factors influencing survival time of children under-five in Nigeria. This is a retrospective cross-sectional quantitative st...

Purpose Although the outbreak of the Corona Virus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) occurred on a global scale, governments from different countries adopted different policies and achieved different anti-epidemic effects. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether and how the government response affected the transmission scale of COVID-19 on the dyn...

Global warming has become the main concern in the current world; increased CO2 emissions are believed to be the main reason for this climate change. Therefore, this study investigates the impacts of energy consumption, economic growth, financial development, and international trade on the CO2 emissions of 17 Asia–Pacific countries. Using unbalanced...

In the present era, economic sustainability depends in many ways on energy security, and this is more applicable for the emerging countries of the world in the perspective of sustainability of their growth. To this end, the present study analyzes the impacts of institutional quality, economic growth, and exports on renewable energy consumption usin...

Higher life expectancy reflects better public health status, an essential element for countries' overall development. However, life expectancy can be affected by various socio-economic and political factors. To mitigate the debate of the contributory factors, a detailed empirical study on factors that affect life expectancy is still a necessity. Th...

The impact of the exchange rate (ER) on the trade balance (TB) has been discussed for many years. However, the issue has not been discussed in sufficient depth, especially in relation to the TB of agricultural products. This paper will gauge this impact on Australia, which has much potential for agro‐based trade in the world market. We have applied...

Urbanization, economic growth, and intensity of electricity consumption are the important causative factors of environmental degradation in South Asia. The present study has revealed this while investigating the relationship between the level of CO2 emissions and important economic variables in the context of five South Asian countries. Panel data...

Background Better understanding of the determinants of national life expectancy is crucial for economic development, as a healthy nation is a prerequisite for a wealthy nation. Many socioeconomic, nutritional, lifestyle, genetic and environmental factors can influence a nation’s health and longevity. Environmental degradation is one of the critical...

Measurement of people’s sustainable wellbeing is important for monitoring and evaluating economic activities. Therefore, there is a need for a statistical approach capturing population’s sustainable wellbeing to complement measures of market activities. Since there are several dimensions of wellbeing, this paper pioneers the measurement of material...

Purpose – In responding to COVID-19, governments around the world have imposed various restrictions with different levels of success. One important aspect of pandemic control is the willingness of individuals to stay home when possible. The purpose of this paper is to study the impact of government restrictions on human mobility in the United State...

Background: Socioeconomic status (SES) is an important determinant of health behaviors in individuals and contributes to a complex relationship with health. Because of this complexity, the relationship between SES and health behavior is still unclear. Thus, this literature review aims to assess the association between socioeconomic inequalities and...

Background The importance of the status of female health should have research priority due to the unique medical needs of women. Hence this paper attempts to explore the nexus of access to electricity, female education, and public health expenditure with female health outcomes in the SAARC-ASEAN countries. Methods Using the data of 2002–2018, and...

High level of carbon emissions is still a policy agenda because of its detrimental effect on environment. CO2 emissions are growing quickly in emerging countries with the high energy consumption, industrial activities, and rapid globalization. So, it is important to examine the roles of emission-inducing factors in these countries. To this end, thi...

Purpose – Based on the fact that punishment and subsidy mechanisms affect the anti-epidemic incentives of major participants in a society, the issue of this paper is how the penalty and subsidy mechanisms affect the decisions of governments, businesses, and consumers during Corona Virus Disease 2019. The goal of this paper is to understand strategi...

Tourism contributes to the growth of an economy via earning foreign currencies and employment opportunities. However, tourism also contributes to greater energy consumption because of various tourist activities such as hotel accommodations and transportation. This study investigates the long-term cointegrating relationship between international tou...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for the betterment of health status, while also considering health expenditure, energy, and environmental issues. This paper examines the nexus between health status and health expenditure (both public and private), energy consumption and environmental pollution in the SAARC-BIMSTEC region....

This study has investigated the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis and focuses on the resource stock of the country in relation to the selection of environmental degradation indicators. Acknowledging the critical role of the EKC for policy formulation and development strategies, this study has examined the validity of the EKC hypothesis b...

Background Although malaria in pregnancy is preventable with the use of intermittent preventive treatment with sulfadoxine–pyrimethamine (IPTp-SP), it still causes maternal morbidity and mortality, in sub-Saharan Africa and Nigeria in particular. Socioeconomic inequality leads to limited uptake of IPTp-SP by pregnant women and is, therefore, a publ...

Environmental problem is a great concern world-wide which has been researched from various angles, including via the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. EKC shows a hypothesized inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and environmental quality. As the severity of problem grows with industrial activities, this paper explores...

This study estimates the private average rate of return (ARR) and internal rate of return (IRR) to education in rural Bangladesh. Using data from the Bangladesh Integrated Household Survey (BIHS) 2015, we estimate average returns using the Mincerian method and IRR using the full method, accounting for both the direct and indirect costs of schooling...

Background Industrial pollution is considered to be a detrimental factor for human health. This study, therefore, explores the link between health status and industrial pollution for the top 20 industrialised countries of the world. Methods Crude death rate is used to represent health status and CO 2 emissions from manufacturing industries and con...

After the economic liberalization in mid-2000, Tanzania has assumed that tourism growth spars economic growth due to the consistent significant contribution of tourism sector to the country's annual income. However, there are limited empirical studies that investigated tourism-economic growth relationship in Tanzania. This study aims to investigate...

This study explores the main factors of economic growth in a panel of the world's 20 biggest economies considering the data period of 39 years (1980–2018). In particular, the roles of international trade, energy use, human capital, and foreign direct investment (FDI) are examined in addition to the roles of capital and labour. To estimate the resul...

This study explores the dynamic relationship of energy consumption, international trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) with economic growth for a panel of BRICS and ASEAN countries over the period of 1990-2017 within a multivariate framework. The panel co-integration test, panel quantile regression method, impulse response function and heterog...

This paper investigates whether energy consumption, population density, and exports are the main factors causing environmental damage in China. Using annual data from 1971–2018, unit root tests are applied for the stationarity analyses, and Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds tests are used for the long-run relationships between the variab...