It looks more like the papers in question are taking a large public dataset and performing some statistical analysis on it, often along the lines of showing a c

It looks more like the papers in question are taking a large public dataset and performing some statistical analysis on it, often along the lines of showing a correlation between metrics which represents pollution (like CO2 emissions) and metrics which represent economic growth. The source data is real, and the analysis is probably real too; neither is likely to trip Benford's law. The problem is that there's nothing novel being uncovered by these articles -- it will surprise no one, for example, to hear that China's CO2 emissions have risen in conjunction with their energy usage and economic growth (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-12217-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-12217-6). Substituting China for Pakistan, or energy usage for foreign remittances, doesn't make for novel research; it's simply plugging in another set of numbers and turning the crank.