Department of Business Administration, Iqra University, Karachi, Pakistan.
Faculty of Information Technology, The University of Lahore, Lahore Campus, Pakistan.
Environ Technol. 2024 Jul;45(17):3439-3455. doi: 10.1080/09593330.2023.2216903. Epub 2023 Jun 11.
This research examines the trends in environmental footprints through energy innovations, digital trade, economic freedom, and environmental regulation from the context of G7 economies. Quarterly observations from 1998-2020 have been utilized for the advanced-panel model entitled Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR). The initial findings confirm slope heterogeneity, interdependence between the cross-sectional units, stationarity properties, and panel cointegration. The results through FM-OLS, D-OLS, and FE-OLS justify that energy innovations, digital trade, and environmental regulations control ecological damages. In contrast, economic freedom and growth are causing more damage to nature, like ecological footprints (EFP). Similarly, the results through MMQR confirm that the impact of energy innovations, digital trade, and environmental regulations is accepted as a panacea to control environmental degradation in G7. However, the magnitude of the coefficient varies across different quantiles. More specifically, the findings show that the impact of energy innovations is highly significant at 0.50th quantile. In contrast, through digital trade, the impact on EFP is only significant under medium and higher order quantiles (i.e. 0.50th, 0.75th-1.0th). Contrarily, economic freedom is causing more EFP across all the quantiles, where the findings are highly significant at 0.75th quantile. Besides, a few other policy implications are also discussed.
本研究从 G7 经济体的角度考察了能源创新、数字贸易、经济自由和环境监管对环境足迹的影响趋势。使用了 1998 年至 2020 年期间的季度观测数据，采用了称为矩分位数回归（MMQR）的高级面板模型。初步结果证实了斜率异质性、横截面单位之间的相互依存关系、平稳性特征和面板协整。FM-OLS、D-OLS 和 FE-OLS 的结果表明，能源创新、数字贸易和环境法规控制着生态破坏。相比之下，经济自由和增长正在对自然造成更多破坏，例如生态足迹（EFP）。同样，MMQR 的结果证实，能源创新、数字贸易和环境法规的影响被视为控制 G7 国家环境退化的灵丹妙药。然而，系数的大小在不同分位数之间有所不同。更具体地说，研究结果表明，能源创新的影响在第 0.50 分位数高度显著。相比之下，通过数字贸易，对 EFP 的影响仅在中高分位数（即 0.50 分位数、0.75 分位数-1.0 分位数）下显著。相反，经济自由在所有分位数上都导致了更多的 EFP，在第 0.75 分位数上的结果高度显著。此外，还讨论了其他一些政策含义。
