Investigating the environmental Kuznets curve for Annex I countries using heterogeneous panel data analysis

Jin, Taeyoung; Kim, Jinsoo

doi:10.1007/s11356-020-07668-w

Research Article
Published: 13 January 2020

Investigating the environmental Kuznets curve for Annex I countries using heterogeneous panel data analysis

Environmental Science and Pollution Research volume 27, pages 10039–10054 (2020)Cite this article

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Abstract

Our paper examines the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) relationship through a heterogeneous panel analysis of 34 Annex I countries for the 1990 to 2016 period. We confirm the long-run equilibrium relationship between carbon emissions, trade openness, fossil fuel usage, and GDP through the panel cointegration tests that is robust to cross-sectional dependence. Overall, our finding is that the empirical results show no consistent evidence of the EKC hypothesis in Annex I countries via mean group and long-run estimation. Country-specific estimation shows that only 5 of the 34 countries support the EKC hypothesis. From the cointegration test to long-run vector estimation, we indirectly show that fossil fuel usage can distort the EKC results by causing endogeneity, since being strong is related to economic growth. From the synthesized statistics of empirical results, Annex I countries do not follow the EKC relationship. This could imply that because no mitigation has been achieved, climate change can become a much more serious issue, although country-specific results show that mitigation is constantly in progress.

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Funding

This work was supported by the Human Resources Development program (No. 20194010201860) of the Korea Institute of Energy Technology Evaluation and Planning (KETEP) grant funded by the Korean government Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy.

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Department of Earth Resources and Environmental Engineering, Hanyang University, 222 Wangsimni-ro, Seongdong-gu, Seoul, 04763, South Korea
Taeyoung Jin & Jinsoo Kim

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Jin, T., Kim, J. Investigating the environmental Kuznets curve for Annex I countries using heterogeneous panel data analysis. Environ Sci Pollut Res 27, 10039–10054 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-07668-w

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Received: 23 September 2019
Accepted: 07 January 2020
Published: 13 January 2020
Issue Date: March 2020
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-020-07668-w

Keywords

Environmental Kuznets curve
Carbon emissions
Annex I countries
Panel data analysis

JEL classification

Q54 Q32 C33