The impact of technological innovation and financial development on environmental pollution in gulf cooperation council - A linear and nonlinear ARDL approach.

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are highly vulnerable to climate change, including rising sea levels, extreme weather, and other environmental and social issues. GCC countries showed remarkable economic growth and development. However, this growth and development put severe pressure on the environment, leading to the degradation of the Environment. Therefore, it is essential to investigate essential factors of environmental degradation, such as technological innovation and financial development. However, per capita income and energy consumption are also crucial factors of environmental degradation. Henceforth, the study carried out panel data from 2001 to 2019 to examine the influence of technological innovation, financial development, energy consumption, and per capita income on environmental degradation in GCC. After conducting necessary preliminary tests, the study employed a symmetric and asymmetric ARDL approach to quantify the numerical estimates. Both symmetric and asymmetric models show that technological innovation reduces environmental degradation, while energy consumption, per capita, and financial development expedite the ecological deterioration in GCC. The Wald tests demonstrate the asymmetric relationship between technological innovation, energy consumption, financial development, and environmental degradation. However, the study fails to find a significant asymmetric relationship between per capita and ecological degradation. The recommendations are added in the recommendation part of the paper.

The influence of FDI on GHG emissions in BRI countries using spatial econometric analysis strategy: the significance of biomass energy consumption.

Indeed, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) plays an increasingly important role in global economic and climate change mitigation. However, scientists have insufficient attention to the issues related to the elements that contribute to justifying these impacts and bolstering its response in BRI nations. Accordingly, the existent study executed an in-depth examination of the spatial direct and spillover effects of foreign direct investment inflows (FDI) and biomass energy consumption (BEC) on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) for 57 BRI countries (1992-2012). We applied the spatial lag model (SLM), the spatial error model (SEM), and the spatial Durbin model (SDM) with five different weights matrices to verify the existence of the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH), the pollution halo hypothesis (P-HH), and the N-shaped environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). We linked the study results with the implementation level of the sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The findings of local Moran's I (LMI) and Lagrange Multiplier (LM) tests confirm the existence of spatial autocorrelation (SAR). The empirical results revealed that FDI has a positive direct and spillover influence on GHG emissions, which supports the presence of PHH. Also, the nexus between economic growth and GHG emission is an N-shaped curve. The results revered that BEC has a negative sign for direct and spillover effects. In contrast to BEC, Fossil Fuel Energy Consumption (FFEC) and population positively sign for direct and indirect impact. Some policy proposals and future research directions are discussed for BRI countries.