Impact of coal rents, transportation, electricity consumption, and economic globalization on ecological footprint in the USA.

Over the last three decades, the world has been facing the phenomenon of the ecological deficit as the ecological footprint is continuously rising due to the persistent decline of the per-capita bio-capacity. Moreover, there is a substantial increase in globalization and electricity consumption for the same period, and transportation is contributing to economic prosperity at the cost of environmental sustainability. Understanding the determinants of ecological footprint is thus critical for suggesting appropriate policies for environmental sustainability. As a result, this study analyzes the impacts of economic globalization, transportation, coal rents, and electricity consumption in ecological footprint in the context of the USA over the period 1995 to 2018. The data have been extracted from "Global Footprint Network," "Swiss Economic Institute," and "World Development Indicators." The current study has also applied the flexible Fourier form nonlinear unit root test to examine the stationarity among variables. For the empirical estimation, a novel technique, the "quantile auto-regressive distributive lag model," is applied in the study to deal with the nonlinear associations of the variables and to evaluate the long-term stability of variables across quantiles. The study's findings indicate that coal rents, transportation, and globalization significantly and positively contribute to the deterioration of ecological footprints at different quantile ranges in the short and long run. Electricity consumption is found to have a positive and significant impact at lower quantile ranges in the long run but not have a significant impact in the short run. The study suggested that lowering the dependence of the transport sector on fossil fuels, more use of hydroelectricity, and stringent strategies to curb coal consumption would be helpful to reduce the positive influence of these variables on ecological footprints in the USA.

Impact of energy efficiency, technology innovation, institutional quality, and trade openness on greenhouse gas emissions in ten Asian economies.

Despite the fact that Asian economies have experienced robust economic growth in recent decades, rising pollution emissions have raised worries among policymakers about the long-term stability of this output growth. Knowing this fact, the present study attempts to empirically analyze the impact of some important factors, e.g., energy efficiency, technology innovations, trade openness, and institutional quality, on environment in 10 Asian economies over the period 1995-2018. Taking into account the slope heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependence present in the data, Westerlund and Edgerton (2008) and Banerjee and Carrion-i-Silvestre (2017) cointegration techniques and cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag model (CS-ARDL) estimation are applied. For robust analysis, augmented mean group (AMG) and common correlated effects mean group (CCEMG) are also employed in the study. The empirical findings provided by selected variables reveal that both trade openness and institutional quality have detrimental impact, whereas energy efficiency and technology innovations have favorable impact on environmental quality in the selected economies. Empirical findings are robust to various policy recommendations. To create a sustainable future environment, Asian economies should focus on the improvement of their institutions quality and increase investments in technology innovations. The Asian countries must encourage trade-related environmental regulations and energy efficiency policies for better and sustainable environmental quality.