School of Management, Universiti Sains Malaysia, 11800 Minden, Penang, Malaysia.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2018 May;25(13):12491-12506. doi: 10.1007/s11356-018-1473-9. Epub 2018 Feb 20.
Environmental degradation is at an alarming level in developing economies. The present paper examines the direct and indirect impacts of corruption on environmental deterioration using the panel data of 64 developing countries. Adopting the generalized method of moments (GMM) technique, the paper finds evidence that corruption exhibits a positive impact on pollution. Subsequently, there is also evidence indicating that the level of pollution tends to be higher in countries with a higher level of corruption, eliminating the effectiveness of income effect on environmental preservation. These results also suggest that environmental degradation is monotonically increasing with higher corruption and invalidate the presence of the EKC. Hence, a policy focuses that an anti-corruption particularly in the environmental and natural resources sector needs to be emphasized and enforced in order to reduce or possibly to totally eliminate the rent for corruption.
发展中经济体的环境恶化已达到令人震惊的程度。本文利用 64 个发展中国家的面板数据，考察了腐败对环境恶化的直接和间接影响。本文采用广义矩估计（GMM）技术，发现腐败对污染有正向影响的证据。随后，也有证据表明，腐败程度较高的国家的污染水平往往较高，从而消除了收入效应对环境保护的影响。这些结果还表明，随着腐败程度的提高，环境恶化呈单调递增，并且无效验 EKC 的存在。因此，需要强调并执行反腐败政策，特别是在环境和自然资源部门，以减少或可能完全消除腐败租金。
