Trade Openness and Carbon Emissions: Evidence from Belt and Road Countries

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors

It is good to have a chance to review your paper. I believe that the research subject of this paper is good in a timely manner. Thus, it has a potential to be published at Sustainability eventually. However, it seems that authors need to be very serious to revise their papers based on my major and minor comments as follows. The most critical issue is the composition of the work and writing quality. As Sustainability has a high standard, authors need to keep those in mind, I think.

<Major Concerns>

    (1) Why do you choose the scope of this study in the Belt and Road countries? Please justify your research motivation and describe expected outcome from this study. The amount of theoretical insights is minimal. It is not sufficient that this subject has not been studied rigorously before in literature.

    (2) In Introduction, authors need to clarify the knowledge gap in literature they want to fill in th is work both in theoretical and practical senses.

    (3) Overall, the composition of the manuscript is very redundant and unorganized. Please try to write the manuscript in a more compact way to shorten the length of the article.

    (4) Your description for research methodology and data is not sufficient and clarified. For example, you wrote that you used the data from World Bank online database. So, which year and what range from World Bank online database? As your writing is really ambiguous, it is very difficult to follow what you exactly did in this study.

    (5) Your description for equations and mathematical expressions is also very insufficient. Your writing should be also explained and supported in a proper and logical way. In addition, the mathematical notations and expressions in equations should be represented very rigorously and mathematically. For example, it is very difficult what f1, f2, f3 and f5 meant in this study.

    (6) Authors showed very many results with tables. However, readers may be overwhelmed by the amount of the unorganized results. Please remove some redundant and unnecessary simple results. Please also organize your results in a more compact and organized way. You may use appendices and online supplement results. It is also a good idea to show a flowchart or some other graphical methods including tables and figures how your research was done step by step.

    (7) The depth, rigor, and scope of the discussion is not sufficient. Although authors showed many simple results, they are not well consistent with theoretical and practical insights and implications.

    (8) The theoretical and practical contributions of your work should be emphasized in your conclusion again. Consistent with the previous studies in literature, authors need to combine their own analysis with the literature effectively and efficiently and provide an organized and compact manuscript.

    (9) The limitations and future directions of this work should be clarified.

<Minor Concerns>

    (1) There is a typo in the title of the paper (i.e. raod -> road).

    (2) Please match this manuscript with the journal format including page numbers, citation/reference, and font et al.

    (3) Some abbreviations are not explained in the main body, abstract, keywords and so on.

    (4) Authors need to consider sending this work to professional and English-native proofreaders. The writing quality is a very big problem in this work including grammatical errors and inappropriate English expressions.

    (5) Some parts in your results and discussions are represented in italic. It is very difficult to guess the reason.

Author Response

Many thanks for your appreciation and valuable comments. We have revised every point based on your good suggestions; our specific amendments are as follows. Thank you so much.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I think the present study may be of interest for readers, and it looks like much of statistical analysis has been done by the authors. However, I have not found much of solid results in the study and it looks more like a descriptive analysis of model application to a particular region. I have some questions/remarks that should be addressed by the authors. I didn't understand the logic in how Eq7 was derived, and to me it was more like just a direct implementation of square of GDP. I would call the way of how the methods are described in the paper (Eq7 and before) as a weak point and many different aspects of the adopted model were simply introduced without much retionale. For example, why the model in Eq2-3 was adopted, and not the other one. This part should be clarified and much improved.

Remarks, typos:

p1, l35: one of the brackets should be removed

p3: I think acronyms MENA and FMOL were not introduced. The same applies for FDI, MG, ARDL, VECM, EKC. Otherwise it is difficult to read.

Eq1-2: what do the functions f1 and f2 stand for? Are they continuous, differentiable? (I didn't understand why f4 is missing in the order of functions f) 

l228: discussing Eqs.6-7 before their definition is probably strange

Eq6: I haven't found a square of GDP in the equation although the authors wrote about it in l228.

l237: the comma is misleading

Eq7: I didn't understand the logic of introduction the square of GDP. It looks not well-explained by the authors, and quite artificial. I think there should be some rationale given by defining a good basis for such definition of Eq7. At the moment, it is not well-grounded.

l359: "Ref not found", the same below in the section

l515-529 look strange

Table 11: what is the explanation of such range in reported turning points? What would USD386314 imply compared to USD6212?

Author Response

Many thanks for your appreciation and valuable comments. We did every point based on your good suggestions; our specific amendments are as follows. thank you so much!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Very interesting paper which reveals the relationship between international trade and environmental quality modeled as carbon emissions. Some issues must be addressed before considering publication:

1) The results description is confusing: the text presents many consecutive pages with tables which are barely explained. This should be reorganized.

2) Please review some typos and many reference errors throughout the paper (e.g. the sentence “(Error! Reference source not found)” appears several times.

3) The paper fails to generalise results, compare them with the existing literature or signal the knowledge gaps remaining to be filled.

4) Some assumptions need to be references (e.g: “A school of thought argued that the above economic indicators are interrelated and need to be 151 studied together”)

5) How can the results be generalized to other geographical locations? Furthermore, how can be the results be translated into applicable policies? We need not only to explain data but also to derive policies from them.

6) Last sections of the manuscript: “author contribution”, “funding”… should be completed and not left in a generic way.

Author Response

Thank you for your valuable comments; we have reorganized the work and explained every table; we have revised every point based on your good suggestions.please see revised version.

Thank you so much.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors

 

It is nice to find that the manuscript has been revised significantly. However, it still has many problems. I hope that all my concerns would be revised sufficiently in the next round.

 

<Major Concerns>

(1)   It may be true that it is the first time to apply EKC framework in BRI project. However, EKC may have been studied quite frequently in literature with other research subjects like other situations. From that point, this study is lack of sufficient literature review for the previous studies in EKC framework. It seems that authors add another work of using EKC framework in literature with the same theoretical background. In this viewpoint, this work has a very weak theoretical contribution and just conducts a similar work only with a different subject, which is BRI project. I am not sure if this work can justified to be published in Sustainability only because it just deals with BRI project. As Sustainability has a rigorous and high standard in its academic value, this work needs to provide sufficient theoretical as well as practical contributions in literature. That is, the results may be good in BRI project, but the extensibility of the results are extremely limited.

(2)   I am not sure if the depth of discussion is sufficient to justify publication in Sustainability.

(3)   EKC is concerned with the relationship between economic growth and inequality. Authors need to add a logical link in the context of this work.

(4)   I mentioned that there are too many simple results in this work. Actually, they took too much proportion of this work. Please move the majority of them into appendix or online supplement. I also believe that the bibliography is too long in reference. It may be a good idea to bring some tables to show the flow of the analysis. On the whole, this work must be written more compactly and shortly.

 

<Minor Concerns>

(1)   The quality of writing is still a serious problem in this work. For example, the references are numbered twice in bibliography. Section 5 is shown twice. There are too many sections. I suggest that authors use subsections in the manuscript to organize.

(2)   Please mention the implications and limitations of this work much more in detail.

(3)   When you use abbreviations, please specify their full description in the first time of usage. For example, the full description is just shown in line 192. However, before the line 192, this abbreviation appears several times.

(4)   Please do not use abbreviations in your abstract. I believe that abstract can be fully understood to readers by itself.

(5)   Words spacing is really inconsistent throughout the manuscript.

Author Response

Many thanks for your appreciation and valuable comments. We have revised every point based on your good suggestions; our specific amendments are as follows. We did extensive editing of English language and style for the whole paper. Most of all, we rewrite almost every section and remove some tables already. Please see the revised edition.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I think the revised manuscript requires more work. Listing numerous tables can be substituted on nicely and relevantly presented plots. Then the results should provide more grained outcome and some insights. The tables can be put in the Supplementary materials. In this case the paper would resemble more like a research paper rather than statistical book.

 

Remarks:

- l220: "Our work selects and uses the maximum number of observations based on the accessibility of data." This is not good, what if the most important part of the data was not reported? For example, some not honest countries would not be eager to share such data. In my opinion, some analysis is the missing data should be provided and analyzed. Is there any possibility for imputation procedure if the missing reports are prevalent for some countries.

- How trustable is the data say for Uzbekistan?

 

Minor remarks

- The phrase "Chinese president" is incorrect

- Probably not orthodox, but conventional?

- Grammar and structure of section 2.2 should be improved

- L232: the word "projected" is not very good there

 

Author Response

Many thanks for your valuable comments. We have revised every point based on your good suggestions; and we did extensive editing of English language and style for the whole paper. Also, we rewrite almost every section and remove some tables already. Please see the revised edition.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The authors have adressed the reviewer's comments.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer:

Many thanks for your appreciation and valuable comments.

Best wishes!

Huaping sun

Jiangsu University

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors

It is very nice to find that the manuscript has been improved significantly in this round. Now I have a few more minor concerns before being accepted.

(1) I am still skeptical for the generalizability of the results. What if in other countries?

(2) What are the theoretical implications and contributions? Please also clarify the knowledge gap you want to fill in this work.

(3) What do you mean by "T>N>T" in line 275?

(4) Equation 9 is not shown very well.

Author Response

Many thanks for your appreciation and valuable comments. We have revised every point based on your good suggestions. Please see revised version.

 

Best wishes!

Huaping sun

Jiangsu     University

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I don't think that the modified version suits for publications. In my previous review, I ask mainly to restructure and somehow improve the overall presentation of the results, to make the conclusions more grained. However, in the current version I still see many tables, and almost no reply to my concerns.

Author Response

Many thanks for your valuable comments. We have revised and restructured every point based on your excellent suggestions; also we deleted almost half of the tables (from 15 to 8 now), and we rewrite the overall presentation of the results.

Thank you so much!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 4

Reviewer 2 Report

The revised manuscript looks Ok. I still encourage the authors to revise and fix all minor errors in the text. 

Editing, Typos etc

- There are quite *many* strange spacing errors in the manuscript. Please, correct them by rereading the manuscript (e.g. there is no space b/w words or a double space). 

- L42: Adam Smith?

- L79: I don't think that coal is a "technique". Please rephrase.

- L79-80: "building industry" is not a good phrase. Please change.

- Please avoid using acronyms in the abstract and introduce them in the main text.

- L99: "orecologicalfactors"?

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.