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The global move toward Internet shopping and its influence on pollution: an empirical analysis

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Abstract

This study investigates the influence of Internet retailing on carbon dioxide (CO2) emission in 77 countries categorized into developed and developing countries during the period of 2000–2013. To realize the aims of the study, a model that represents pollution is established utilizing the panel two-stage least square (TSLS) and the generalized method of moments (GMM). The results for both regressions similarly indicated that GDP growth, electricity consumption, urbanization, and trade openness are the main factors that increase CO2 emission in the investigated countries. Although the results show that Internet retailing reduces CO2 emission in general, a disaggregation occurs between developed and developing countries whereby Internet retailing has a significant negative effect on CO2 emission in the developed countries while it has no significant impact on CO2 emission in the developing countries. From the outcome of this study, a number of policy implications are provided for the investigated countries.

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. The studies included in Table 1 examined the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis by including the GDP and GDP square in their regression to investigate whether an inverted U-shaped relationship between income and pollution do exists. However, the short time series of our data prevented this research to examine this hypothesis.

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Correspondence to Usama Al-Mulali.

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Al-Mulali, U., Sheau-Ting, L. & Ozturk, I. The global move toward Internet shopping and its influence on pollution: an empirical analysis. Environ Sci Pollut Res 22, 9717–9727 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-015-4142-2

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