Following the global shutdown of tourism at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, small island developing states such as The Bahamas had their economies immobilized due to their heavy dependence on the industry. Beyond economic recovery in a post COVID-19 paradigm, the blue economy, blue growth, and associated activities offer pathways for a more resilient economy and is well-suited for The Bahamas. This paper suggests conduits for economic development using a traditional strength, coastal and marine tourism, in conjunction with the emerging fields of ocean renewable energy, offshore aquaculture, marine biotechnology, and bioprospecting. The interlinkages between each activity are discussed. Knowledge gaps in offshore aquaculture, ocean renewable energy, marine biotechnology, and marine environment monitoring are identified. In each sector case, strategic and tactical decision-making can be achieved through the exploitation of ocean numerical modeling and observations, and consequently should be invested in and developed alongside the requisite computational resources. Blue growth is encouraged, but instances of blue injustice are also highlighted. Crucially, pursuing blue economy activities should be given top national priority for economic recovery and prosperity.

Governments design and implement policies to achieve a variety of goals, but perhaps none are as pressing as shifting national economies away from non-renewable fuels and towards more sustainable, environmentally-friendly technologies. To incentivize such transitions, governments provide subsidies to private and public companies to innovate, i.e., to engage in research and development (R&D) to develop those technologies. However, the question of the companies is using government subsidies (GS) to perform R&D and its answer determines the effectiveness of government policies. Consequently, this paper seeks to answer this question through investigating Chinese lithium-ion battery (LiB) firms and the GS they receive through novel usage of information flow (IF). Hausman tests, fixed- and random-effects models confirmed a weak, though positive correlation between GS and R&D as determined by patent output (PO), but interestingly, observations of IF intimated that GS also affected other variables such as net profit (NP) and main business income (MBI). This suggests that firms are being awarded GS for higher PO, but a corresponding increase in R&D and its expected growth in company performance is not occurring. Thus, it is suggested that performance variables other than PO be used as firms may ab (use) this metric to apply for more GS, rather than performing R&D that leads to technological breakthroughs.