Livelihood earning in desert areas has always been a challenge worldwide due to droughts and natural hazards. This study aims to analyze livelihood diversification strategies (income, wealth, and livelihood diversifications) and the impact of human, natural, physical, financial, and social capital on the well‐being of the people of the Cholistan Desert located in Punjab, Pakistan. Following multistage random sampling, primary data are collected from 900 households in multiple villages of the Cholistan Desert, which are analyzed using descriptive statistics and the two‐stage least squares (2SLS) method. Livestock (33.73%), its byproducts (34.82%), remittances (8.52%), agriculture farming (12.65%) and others like jobs, tenancy status and off‐farm earning (10.28%) are witnessed as main livelihood strategies. Landholding, education, access to credit, and access to road (market center, transport pick up point, etc.), possession of large herds are major triggering factors for income and wealth via constructing a portfolio of diversified livelihood strategies by residents of the area. Aggravating education level, enhancing credit availability, and infrastructure improvement are momentous for keeping the pendulum of livelihood strategies swinging in momentum and stimulating households to adopt different livelihood activities in the Cholistan Desert of Pakistan.

It has been almost three decades that economies are striving for innovations to uplift their production frontier. This study endeavors to find the impact of Technology Choice Index (TCI) and patents to shape the export diversification scenario in sixty five middle income countries for the period 1995-2021. The countries are further segregated in two groups i.e. Upper Middle Income (UMI) and Lower Middle Income (LMI). The employed estimation technique is Method of Moment Quantile Regression (MMQR). The results favour both innovation strategies to affect diversification in exports. Moreover, higher incentives for innovative output and higher productivity for manufacturing produce will have stronger spillover effects upon diversified export frontier. Further, these findings suggest that adopting TCI should be at a balance between risks and benefits attached to it, as policy tool in these countries. The optimal increase in TCI and patents filing will remain a fortifying option for middle income countries to increase export diversification. Future studies need to dig export diversification at country specific sectoral level

Developing countries have been trying to diversify their exports baskets since 1990s. Particularly, these countries are striving for export diversification through external capital resources inflow in the economy. This study attempts to explore the impact of external capital resources i.e. foreign direct investment inflow, remittances received, foreign aid and total external debt on export diversification. Moreover, this study utilizes a balanced panel of sixty five developing countries over the period 1995-2021 by employing a newly developed panel data estimation method, cross sectional Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (CS-ARDL). The robustness is checked by another novel estimation technique i.e. Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR). The estimation methods are expounding heterogeneity and endogeniety. Empirical examination for four forms of foreign capital inflows do provide varying degree of significant contribution for increasing export diversification. Three capital resources are significant contributors whereby one of these resources are warranting export concentration. Further, these findings suggest that optimal inflow of external capital can be useful for sample countries and their productive use of external capital resources can serve as crucial channel to affect export diversification.