Sultana Nahid, Rahman Mohammad Mafizur, Khanam Rasheda, Kabir Zobaidul
School of Business, University of Southern Queensland, Australia and Department of Economics, Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh.
Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh.
Heliyon. 2022 Jun 6;8(6):e09569. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e09569. eCollection 2022 Jun.
This paper explores the impacts of informal economic activities and institutional capacity, particularly, corruption control on the environmental quality degradation of emerging economies under the prevailing socio-economic conditions and energy use patterns of the countries. The study utilizes key environmental degradation indicators: Carbon dioxide (CO) emissions, ecological footprints (EFs), and Nitrous Oxide (NO) emissions, and a panel dataset of 15 emerging countries for the period 2002-2019 to undertake an empirical investigation. The pooled mean group (PMG)-ARDL estimator, Fully Modified OLS (FMOLS), Dynamic OLS (DOLS) and Augmented Mean Group (AMG) methods have been applied as empirical investigation techniques. The empirical findings reveal that in the long-run informal economic activities positively affect the environmental quality with fewer recorded emissions of CO and EFs while these activities affect negatively to NO emissions. This study has also found that corruption control improves environmental quality by reducing EFs and NO emissions but works to the opposite by increasing recorded CO emissions. An increase in economic growth and renewable energy consumption improves environmental quality in emerging countries, while consumption of non-renewable energy degrades the environmental quality. The robust empirical findings advocate policy initiatives for intense monitoring of informal activities and implementation of indirect tax policy to regulate informal activities and the pollution they cause. Careful measures of corruption control and initiatives to bring the informal economic activities into a formal framework are suggested to reduce CO and NO emissions. An increase in economic growth with more focus on renewables and phasing out non-renewables can ensure green growth in emerging countries.
本文探讨了在各国当前的社会经济条件和能源使用模式下，非正规经济活动和制度能力，特别是腐败控制对新兴经济体环境质量退化的影响。该研究利用关键的环境退化指标：二氧化碳（CO）排放、生态足迹（EFs）和氧化亚氮（NO）排放，并采用2002 - 2019年期间15个新兴国家的面板数据集进行实证研究。实证研究技术采用了混合平均组（PMG）-自回归分布滞后估计器、完全修正普通最小二乘法（FMOLS）、动态普通最小二乘法（DOLS）和增强平均组（AMG）方法。实证结果表明，从长期来看，非正规经济活动对环境质量有积极影响，CO和EFs的排放量较少，而这些活动对NO排放有负面影响。该研究还发现，腐败控制通过减少EFs和NO排放来改善环境质量，但却因增加记录的CO排放而产生相反的效果。经济增长和可再生能源消费的增加改善了新兴国家的环境质量，而非可再生能源的消费则降低了环境质量。有力的实证结果主张采取政策举措，加强对非正规活动的监测，并实施间接税收政策来规范非正规活动及其造成的污染。建议采取谨慎的腐败控制措施，并采取举措将非正规经济活动纳入正式框架，以减少CO和NO排放。以更多地关注可再生能源和逐步淘汰不可再生能源来实现经济增长，可以确保新兴国家的绿色增长。
