Abstract
The objective of the study is to extend the existing literature by investigating the effects of foreign direct investment, gross domestic products and per capita and energy diversification on the nitrogen oxide emissions in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) by using annual data during the period 1992–2019. As per our knowledge, the present study is a first of its kind to examine the impact of a new energy diversification index, based on Herfindahl-Hirschman framework on pollution. This study has adopted a new quantile regression augmented method of moments, which is capable of producing the total impacts of the independent variables across the entire distribution of nitrogen oxides emissions. The findings suggest that an increase in foreign direct investment leads to a decrease in nitrogen oxides emissions at the aggregate level and in both manufacturing and service sectors. We observe that foreign direct investment leads to an increase in nitrogen oxides emissions in the agricultural sector in most of the quantiles. Diversification towards renewable energy causes a decrease in nitrogen oxides emissions in most quantiles at aggregate level, agricultural and manufacturing sectors, whilst diversification leads to an increase in nitrogen oxides emissions in the service sector. The findings also suggest that GDP per capita leads to an increase in NOx emissions in all the quantiles. The study suggests the policy to use and attract more clean energy through foreign direct investment for towards the achievement of sustainable development.
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Data availability
Data on the FDI at the sectoral level is taken from various sources, reports and the respective country specific sources. For China, sectoral FDI data is collected from Ministry of Commerce, People's Republic of China, Ministry of Foreign Trade and Economic Cooperation and China Statistical Year book. For India, data is taken from Reserve Bank of India, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion and Ministry of Finance (various issues). Data for Brazil is taken from Central Bank of Brazil and Internal Monetary Fund Coordinated Direct Investment Survey. Data for Russia is compiled from Bank of Russia periodicals. Data for South Africa is taken from South Africa Reserve bank and Thomas and Leape (2005). The source of the energy source renewable energy innovation data is Statistical Review of World Energy Statistics of the British Petroleum. The source of real GDP per is the World Development Indicators of the World Bank.
Notes
There is a difference between the total FDI and the sectoral FDI of the BRICS countries, when added. This difference is because some FDIs are reported in the unspecified sectors of each country.
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Sakiru Adebola Solarin: conceptualization (ideas; formulation or evolution of overarching research goals and aims); methodology (development or design of methodology, creation of models); software (programming, software development; designing computer programmes; implementation of the computer code and supporting algorithms; testing of existing code components); formal analysis (application of statistical, mathematical, computational or other formal techniques to analyse or synthesise study data); data curation (management activities to annotate (produce metadata), scrub data and maintain research data (including software code, where it is necessary for interpreting the data itself) for initial use and later reuse); supervision (oversight and leadership responsibility for the research activity planning and execution, including mentorship external to the core team); and project administration (management and coordination responsibility for the research activity planning and execution). Pritish Kumar Sahu: validation (verification, whether as a part of the activity or separate, of the overall replication/reproducibility of results/experiments and other research outputs); investigation (conducting a research and investigation process, specifically performing the experiments or data/evidence collection); resources (provision of study materials, reagents, materials, patients, laboratory samples, animals, instrumentation, computing resources or other analysis tools); writing—original draft (preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically writing the initial draft (including substantive translation)); writing—review and editing (preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work by those from the original research group, specifically critical review, commentary or revision including pre- or post-publication stages); and visualisation (preparation, creation and/or presentation of the published work, specifically visualisation/data presentation).
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Solarin, S.A., Sahu, P.K. Sectoral foreign direct investment and environmental degradation: new insights from diversification of energy mix containing fossil fuels and renewable energy. Environ Sci Pollut Res 30, 91853–91873 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-28741-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-023-28741-0