Ali Sajid, Anser Muhammad Khalid
Multan, Pakistan School of Economics, Bahauddin Zakariya University.
Lahore, Pakistan Faculty of Business and Management Sciences, The Superior University.
Int J Environ Res. 2023;17(3):44. doi: 10.1007/s41742-023-00530-0. Epub 2023 May 15.
The global outbreak of COVID-19 caused serious threats to public health and economic growth all around the world, but on the other hand, the betterment of the environment took place. How pandemics' health uncertainty will affect environmental quality is a crucial matter to address. The paper investigates the asymmetric association between pandemics-related health uncertainty and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the top emitter European Union economies (Italy, Germany, France, Poland, Netherlands, Spain, Czech Republic, Belgium, Romania, and Greece). Employing data from 1996 to 2019, a unique approach called 'Quantile-on-Quantile', is adopted to evaluate the influence of various quantiles of the health uncertainty on GHG emissions. According to estimates, health uncertainty enhances environmental quality by minimizing GHG in most of our chosen nations at certain quantiles of data, which makes pandemics a blessing in disguise for environmental quality. Additionally, the estimations indicate that the grades of asymmetry between our variables varies by locality, accentuating the requisite for authorities to give specific consideration while executing health uncertainty and environmental quality policies.
新冠疫情的全球爆发对世界各地的公共卫生和经济增长造成了严重威胁，但另一方面，环境却得到了改善。疫情带来的健康不确定性将如何影响环境质量是一个亟待解决的关键问题。本文研究了欧盟主要排放经济体（意大利、德国、法国、波兰、荷兰、西班牙、捷克共和国、比利时、罗马尼亚和希腊）中与疫情相关的健康不确定性与温室气体排放（GHG）之间的不对称关联。利用1996年至2019年的数据，采用一种名为“分位数对分位数”的独特方法，评估健康不确定性的各个分位数对温室气体排放的影响。据估计，在某些数据分位数上，健康不确定性通过减少温室气体排放提高了我们所选大多数国家的环境质量，这使得疫情对环境质量而言是因祸得福。此外，估计结果表明，我们变量之间的不对称程度因地区而异，这凸显了当局在执行健康不确定性和环境质量政策时进行具体考量的必要性。
