School of Economics, Zhongnan University of Economics and Law, Wuhan, 430073, China.
Department of Economics, Government College University Faisalabad, Faisalabad, 38000, Pakistan.
Environ Sci Pollut Res Int. 2021 Apr;28(13):16568-16588. doi: 10.1007/s11356-020-11576-4. Epub 2021 Jan 2.
This study investigates the impact of globalization, financial development, and energy utilization on environmental sustainability in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. GCC countries are currently experiencing higher demand and utilization of energy resources, high global integration, and improvements in the financial sector that poses serious environmental sustainability challenges. We have employed a relatively comprehensive proxy, i.e., ecological footprint for environmental sustainability and more advanced and robust econometric strategies (second-generation) to examine the impact of globalization, financial development, and energy utilization on environmental sustainability in the GCC countries, which have a significant departure from the extant literature. The results of this study show that globalization, financial development, and energy utilization are significantly deteriorating the environmental quality in the GCC countries. Additionally, in order to account for the national heterogeneity, we have performed country-specific analysis and interestingly, results reveal that globalization, financial development, and energy utilization negatively influence the environmental sustainability in each sample country that is consistent with the findings of overall panel. Furthermore, the findings are robust to various robustness checks that we have performed for checking the reliability of our main findings. This study also offers some useful policy implications to the stakeholder in general and specifically concerning the GCC countries for promoting their environmental sustainability.
本研究考察了全球化、金融发展和能源利用对海湾合作委员会（GCC）国家环境可持续性的影响。GCC 国家目前正经历着更高的能源需求和利用、更高的全球一体化以及金融部门的改善，这对环境可持续性构成了严峻挑战。我们采用了一个相对全面的代理指标，即生态足迹来衡量环境可持续性，并采用更先进和稳健的计量经济学策略（第二代）来研究全球化、金融发展和能源利用对 GCC 国家环境可持续性的影响，这与现有文献有很大的不同。本研究的结果表明，全球化、金融发展和能源利用正在显著恶化 GCC 国家的环境质量。此外，为了考虑国家异质性，我们进行了特定国家的分析，有趣的是，结果表明全球化、金融发展和能源利用对每个样本国家的环境可持续性都有负面影响，这与总体面板的结果一致。此外，我们进行了各种稳健性检验，以检查我们主要发现的可靠性，结果表明这些发现是稳健的。本研究还为利益相关者提供了一些有用的政策建议，总体上和特别是针对 GCC 国家，以促进其环境可持续性。
