Original title: Toward a sustainable post-pandemic growth
Ivan Sudibyo · September 2026
Growing economies often struggle to reduce pollution. Researchers wanted to see what drives Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions over time in five Southeast Asian countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. They looked at data from 2000–2023 on population size, investments, financial markets, and Research and Development (R&D) spending, which is money spent on inventing new technologies. They found that population is the single most consistent driver of CO2 emissions across all five nations. More people directly meant more emissions. Meanwhile, R&D spending had a negative link with emissions, but this effect was not statistically meaningful because overall R&D spending in the region remains low. Finally, foreign investments and financial markets reduced emissions in some countries while increasing them in others.
Imagine you have a garden that keeps getting more weeds. You try different things: buying better tools, adding fertilizer, changing the soil. But the main reason weeds keep coming back is that the garden itself keeps getting bigger—you add more plots every year. The tools help a little, but not enough to keep up. In this paper, the garden is a country's economy, the weeds are CO2 emissions, and adding more plots is population growth. The tools are R&D spending and green finance, which help but cannot offset the growth.
For countries like Indonesia and Vietnam that are growing fast but still poor, this means climate policy cannot focus only on factories and cars. The largest source of rising CO2 is simply more people. Unless R&D spending triples and financial markets fund green projects, growth will keep pushing emissions up.
The abstract does not report effect sizes or confidence intervals for the population coefficient, so we cannot know how much a 1% population increase raises emissions. The R&D result is statistically insignificant, meaning the study cannot confirm that R&D reduces emissions in these countries—it only shows the observed negative relationship might be due to chance. Country-level heterogeneity is noted for FDI and financial markets but not explained in detail.
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Toward a sustainable post-pandemic growth — Ivan Sudibyo — SocArXiv — doi:10.31235/osf.io/7j6cr_v1
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper. This is a preprint, so it hasn't necessarily been peer reviewed.