Abstract
This study investigates the heterogeneous effects of remittance inflows, institutional quality, foreign direct investment, energy consumption, financial development, and trade openness on the ecological footprint spanning from 1990 to 2016 for the global panel of 93 countries. The current study employs a panel quantile regression (PQR) approach for tickling the distributional and unobserved country-specific heterogeneity. The findings reveal that remittance inflows significantly enhanced the environmental degradation in 5th to 70th quantiles and it turns to becomes negative at 80th to 95th quantiles. Similarly, institutional quality also deteriorates the environmental quality in all quantiles except higher quantiles such as 90th and 95th quantiles, which shows the improved environmental quality. Furthermore, the results support the validity of an inverted U-shaped environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. In addition, financial development, energy consumption, and trade openness significantly deteriorate the environmental quality in the long run. In contrast, foreign direct investment improves environmental sustainability. Moreover, these findings are robust to various robustness analyses which confirm the consistency of the results. Related policy proposals are then offered according to our empirical findings.
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Change history
05 April 2021
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13791-z
Notes
The point, were, the maximum emissions level
Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa
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Atif Jahanger and Muhammad Usman conceived and designed the study. Atif Jahanger and Muhammad Usman designed the methodology and wrote the manuscript. Atif Jahanger and Muhammad Usman reviewed and edited the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the manuscript.
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Usman, M., Jahanger, A. Heterogeneous effects of remittances and institutional quality in reducing environmental deficit in the presence of EKC hypothesis: A global study with the application of panel quantile regression. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 37292–37310 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13216-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13216-x