School of Economics and Management, Zhejiang University of Science and Technology, Hangzhou, China.
China Center for Special Economic Zone Research, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China.
PLoS One. 2023 Oct 11;18(10):e0291930. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0291930. eCollection 2023.
As a result of rapid economic expansion, increased energy use, and urbanization, global warming and climate change have become serious challenges in recent decades. Institutional quality can be the remedy to impede the harmful effect of factors on environmental quality. This study investigates the impact that urbanization and institutional quality on environmental quality in in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries from 2002 to 2019. By using two step generalized method of moment, the findings shows that urbanization leads to an increase in carbon dioxide emissions and a decline in environmental quality. On the other hand, the square term of urbanization indicates that an increase in urbanization leads to a reduction in emissions at a later stage after reach a certain level. Education, on the other hand, has the reverse impact of increasing carbon emissions; economic growth, foreign direct investment, and government effectiveness all boost carbon emissions. In a similar vein, the interaction between urbanization and the effectiveness of the government is unfavorable, underscoring the transformative role that the effectiveness of the government plays in leading to environmental sustainability. Finally, the findings of this study have considerable policy implication for the sample countries.
由于经济的快速扩张、能源的消耗增加以及城市化的发展，全球变暖与气候变化在近几十年已经成为了严重的挑战。制度质量可以用来缓解这些因素对环境质量的不利影响。本研究旨在探讨城市化和制度质量对“一带一路”倡议（BRI）国家 2002 年至 2019 年期间环境质量的影响。通过两步广义矩方法（GMM），研究结果表明城市化会导致二氧化碳排放增加和环境质量下降。另一方面，城市化的平方项表明，在达到一定水平后，城市化的增加会在后期导致排放量的减少。而教育则会产生相反的影响，即增加碳排放；经济增长、外国直接投资和政府效能都促进了碳排放。同样，城市化和政府效能之间的相互作用是不利的，这凸显了政府效能在实现环境可持续性方面的变革作用。最后，本研究的结论对样本国家具有重要的政策意义。
