Department of Management, School of Economics and Management, Northeast Electric Power University, Jilin City, China.
Department of Communication, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, United States of America.
PLoS One. 2020 Aug 27;15(8):e0237597. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0237597. eCollection 2020.
Several factors influence the environmental performance simultaneously but ethnic fractionalization, political freedom, financial development and institutional quality have a substantial impact to explain the environmental performance across economies. This study focuses to explore that how environmental performance is affected by these economic, political and social indicators by using the annual data of 163 developed and developing countries covering the time period of 1996-2016.The data is collected from World Development Indicators, World Governance Indicators, Freedom House and Cline Centre. The stationarity of variables is analyzed through LLC, IPS and ADF Fisher Chi-square test. Before applying panel ARDL approach to find out the long run relationship among variables, order of integration is determined through Pedroni's cointegration test. The findings of study highlight that ethnic diversity; institutional quality and political freedom play a significant role to decrease CO2emissions while energy consumption, GDP growth and financial development are increasing the environmental degradation. Ethnic diversity is a source of creative and innovative approaches about problem solving of environmental degradation. Political freedom allows people to participate in decision making that posits much compliance with environmental agreements. The foreign direct investment is attracted by good quality institutions which cause to advent of more environment friendly technology along with attractions for further innovations that may helpful to reduce CO2 emissions. Contrary, GDP growth, financial development and energy consumption enhance the industrialization and urbanization leading to increase the level of CO2 emissions. It is suggested for policy makers that cohesion among different ethnic groups; improving institutional quality; providing political freedom to people and inclusive financial sector will acknowledge the less pollutant environment.
有几个因素会同时影响环境绩效，但族裔分裂、政治自由、金融发展和制度质量对解释各经济体的环境绩效有重大影响。本研究旨在通过使用涵盖 1996-2016 年期间的 163 个发达国家和发展中国家的年度数据，探讨这些经济、政治和社会指标如何影响环境绩效。数据来自世界发展指标、世界治理指标、自由之家和克莱因中心。通过 LLC、IPS 和 ADF Fisher 卡方检验分析变量的平稳性。在应用面板 ARDL 方法来发现变量之间的长期关系之前，通过佩德罗尼的协整检验确定整合的顺序。研究结果表明，族裔多样性、制度质量和政治自由在减少二氧化碳排放方面发挥了重要作用，而能源消耗、GDP 增长和金融发展则加剧了环境恶化。族裔多样性是解决环境退化问题的创造性和创新性方法的源泉。政治自由使人们能够参与决策，从而更遵守环境协议。良好的制度质量吸引了外国直接投资，这导致了更环保技术的出现，以及对进一步创新的吸引力，这可能有助于减少二氧化碳排放。相反，GDP 增长、金融发展和能源消耗促进了工业化和城市化，导致二氧化碳排放量增加。研究建议政策制定者，不同族裔群体之间的凝聚力、提高制度质量、为人民提供政治自由和包容性的金融部门将有助于创造污染较少的环境。
