PONE-D-20-37757

The effects of carbon emission, rainfall, temperature, inflation, population and unemployment on economic growth in Saudi Arabia: an ARDL investigation

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Murad,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Ghaffar Ali, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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We will update your Data Availability statement to reflect the information you provide in your cover letter.

Additional Editor Comments:

Reviewers are not so positive regarding this manuscript they have objections and reservations on almost all sections of this paper. However, I suggest to give authors a chance to improve this paper significantly and make decision after second round. Reviewers have highlighted these points:

1. English language editing is required.

2. Length of the paper is an issue.

3. Introduction section needs revisions in terms of clarity, rationale, problem statement, and objective, etc.

4. Data and methodology section needs plenty of improvement in terms of baseline and analysis of variables.

5. It is also suggested to reduce number of variable because economic growth itself contains almost all economic variables instead of segregating them in the topic and in analyses. Analysis can be revisited comprehensively.

6. Results and discussion can be further improved in the light of comments of the reviewers.

7. Practical policy implications and way forward are missing.

8. Last but not least, please pay serious attention to the author guidelines, currently the paper format is not according to the journal guidelines.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: No

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: This is an interesting manuscript that covers a range of climate change, social and macroeconomic issues with reference to Saudi Arabia. It discusses an important cluster of numerous questions in Saudi Arabia. I include several comments that should be addressed before publishing this manuscript. Some comments are specific, other are general. The details are given bellow:

1. Length. This paper is very long. In particular, Introduction and review of literature section should be compact and arranged the citation ascending or descending order.

2. The English is better but still requires major editing.

3. Data. Annul Time series data is used from the 1990 to 2019. Data is taken from multiple sources; hence, the base year of data set is not similar. You should mention how you equated the base year.

4. Overall results section is good, but there is need to add some recent studies for cross citation.

5. Add some policy measures that should be based on results

Reviewer #2: In this manuscript authors tried to explore the possible relationships among several climatic-social dimension with economic development.

Overall, the manuscript is poorly written and structured. I am afraid, in its current form, it may not be able to create an interest in readers for global audience.

Abstract, author did not set up a reasonable background of the research objective – the reason why this research is important.

In the introduction, the authors failed to establish a testable hypothesis and interdependencies of the selected variable with the GDP or economic growth.

Methods and Results are poor and do not fit well. There is no discussion and inferences derived from the study.

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6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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The effects of carbon emissions, rainfall, temperature, inflation, population and unemployment on economic growth in Saudi Arabia: an ARDL investigation

PONE-D-20-37757R1

Dear Dr. Murad,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org.

If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org.

Kind regards,

Ghaffar Ali, PhD

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: I am OK with the revised version.

The authors have addressed all the comments in the revised version.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No