Assessing the effects of trade openness on sustainable development: evidence from India

Over the years, world market is integrating at much faster pace through increasing trade openness. Not being an unmixed blessing, consistent efforts have been made to examine impact of trade openness on economic, environmental and social welfare. This study is an attempt to empirically examine the implications of trade openness on sustainable development in India since liberalization policy 1991. We used the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to test the relationship between sustainable development and trade openness along with other control variables that are supposed to affect sustainable development. The results established supports the opinion of environmentalists. The empirical results are contrary to the conventionally held belief, indicating that trade shares a negative correlation with green GDP growth and positive correlation with gap between conventional GDP and green GDP. These findings support the arguments that trade openness tend to be both distorting and detrimental to the future generations.

Sustainable product purchase: does information about product sustainability on social media affect purchase behavior?

Nowadays, consumer-to-consumer communication and its impact on purchase decisions have gained substantial consideration owing to digitalization and the emergence of internet-based social media platforms. Social media allows consumers to communicate with thousands of people well beyond their network. Consequently, the demand for transparency from industrial corporations has increased. It even becomes more important to understand how sustainability-related information on social media holds organizations accountable for their wrongdoings and reward them for taking sustainability-related initiatives. In this research work, the authors investigate how information that is available on social media influences consumers’ purchase behavior with regard to sustainable products in the context of developing countries. Therefore, the authors surveyed social media users residing in Pakistan and used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) to analyze the collected data. The results established that positive and negative sustainability-related information on social media significantly influences consumers’ intention to purchase sustainable products. Furthermore, this study explains that consumers’ willingness to seek sustainability-related information makes them dependent on social media and this dependency on social media affects their intention to purchase.