Alhassan Abdulkareem, Usman Ojonugwa, Ike George N, Sarkodie Samuel Asumadu
Faculty of Business and Economics, Department of Economics, Eastern Mediterranean University, Gazimagusa North Cyprus, Via Mersin 10, Turkey.
Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, Federal Universityof Lafia, Lafia, Nasarawa, Nigeria.
Heliyon. 2020 Sep 25;6(9):e05046. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e05046. eCollection 2020 Sep.
Trade has become a carrier for transporting both clean and dirty (pollution-intensive) goods, services and technologies between countries. While the impact of trade on economic development has been reported in the extant literature, insufficient and inconsistent results exist between pollution-embedded trade and environmental performance. Using the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), Generalized method of moments and panel quantiles via Moments, this study explored the role of government integrity on trade-environment nexus in the post-Kyoto protocol era for 79 countries between 2008 and 2018. The empirical results suggest that per capita GDP and government integrity improve environmental performance whereas trade impedes it. In the quantile regression model, the effect of government integrity is significant at the median quantiles with a stronger effect in countries with higher environmental performance. The negative effect of trade is not only significant from the lower quantile through the median quantile but decreases in magnitude, tracking from countries with lower to higher environmental performance. While the positive effect of government integrity is significant from the median quantile onwards, the negative effect of trade is only significant in the lower quantile. Robustness analysis from the GMM dynamic panel estimation technique shows that interacting government integrity with trade yields a positive and significant coefficient. Meaning that improved government integrity averts the negative effect of trade on environmental performance. The study suggests that outsourcing the regulations of trade-oriented multinational companies operating in developing economies with weak institutions to global humanitarian organisations such as the United Nations would be the first step to reduce trade-attributable environmental degradation.
贸易已成为国家之间运输清洁和肮脏（污染密集型）商品、服务及技术的载体。虽然现有文献中已报道了贸易对经济发展的影响，但在隐含污染的贸易与环境绩效之间，存在不充分且不一致的结果。本研究采用普通最小二乘法（OLS）、广义矩方法以及矩估计的面板分位数方法，探讨了2008年至2018年间79个国家在《京都议定书》后时代政府廉洁对贸易与环境关系的作用。实证结果表明，人均国内生产总值和政府廉洁会改善环境绩效，而贸易则会阻碍环境绩效。在分位数回归模型中，政府廉洁的影响在中位数分位数上显著，在环境绩效较高的国家影响更强。贸易的负面影响不仅在低分位数到中位数分位数上显著，而且其幅度会减小，从环境绩效较低的国家到较高的国家呈递减趋势。虽然政府廉洁的积极影响从中位数分位数开始显著，但贸易的负面影响仅在低分位数上显著。广义矩动态面板估计技术的稳健性分析表明，将政府廉洁与贸易相互作用会产生一个正向且显著的系数。这意味着政府廉洁的改善可避免贸易对环境绩效的负面影响。该研究表明，将在制度薄弱的发展中经济体运营的以贸易为导向的跨国公司的监管外包给联合国等全球人道主义组织，将是减少贸易导致的环境退化的第一步。
