Natural resources, human capital, and CO2 emissions: Missing evidence from the Central Asian States.

There are papers on association about natural resources, economic expansion, and their effect on the quality of the environment in Central Asia. However, no study has investigated the effect of human capital in this nexus concerning the Central Asian states. Thus this study investigates the link between natural resources, economic expansion, human capital, and CO2 in Central Asian states by employing Pooled Mean Group (PMG) and the Dumitrescu and Hurlin (DH) causality tests from 1995 to 2018. The outcomes from the PMG model showed that human capital has an opposite and significant association with CO2 in the short and long run. Therefore, it is stated that local human capital with higher environmental awareness through education and training makes a positive impact on environmental quality. With the growth of the natural resources index and expansion of the economy, Central Asian emissions will rise. With a positive and substantial coefficient of the natural resources, the finding suggests that, even though Central Asian states have plenty of natural resources, they are unable to exploit them efficiently to reap good rent advantages to reduce the emissions. The outcomes of the causality test stated that the index of natural resources, economic expansion, and human capital have one-way causality with emissions. The important policies and recommendations for maintaining the economic and environmental sustainability of this country are provided at the end of this paper.

The decline in carbon intensity: the role of financial expansion and hydro-energy.

The effect of a broad financial index (FD), hydro-energy output, and expansion of the economy on the intensity of carbon were investigated by incorporating the effect of financial expansion through the channel of hydro-energy. The cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL), Mean Group (MG), Augmented Mean Group (AMG), and vector error correction mechanism causality approaches were employed to study panel data for the period from 1980 to 2017 for the top four hydro-energy producing states. The outcomes revealed that FD raises the intensity of carbon in both the short and long term. In contrast, hydro-energy output (HYP) is stated to be a significant factor for attaining a low carbon intensity in the short and long term. The outcomes also indicated that the expansion of the economy augments the intensity of carbon. However, FD lowers the intensity of carbon via the channel of hydro-energy. The causality test outcomes revealed a short-run causality moving from the intensity of carbon to hydro-energy as well as a short-term causality moving from GDP to the intensity of carbon. It was also observed that there is a long-term causality running from all the variables to the intensity of carbon. Important policy implications are suggested at the end of the research.

Testing the effect of sustainable energy and military expenses on environmental degradation: evidence from the states with the highest military expenses.

This paper aims to define the effects of military expenses and renewable energy consumption on carbon dioxide emissions for the ten countries with the highest military expenses, namely, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Russia, the USA, South Korea, India, France, Australia, China, and the UK from 1993 to 2017. The research applied the common correlated effects mean group estimator (CCEMG), dynamic CCEMG, and cross-sectional augmented autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) approaches. These dynamic techniques elucidate slope heterogeneity and cross-sectional dependency and solve the problem of unit root bias. It is found that the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis does not apply for this region. The findings demonstrate that military expenses increase carbon dioxide emissions; thus, the treadmill theory of destruction is valid for the panel of these countries, and it is also found that the consumption of sustainable energy decreases CO2 emissions. This suggests that a reduction in pollution can be achieved by increasing sustainable energies in the use of military vehicles to decrease emissions. Further important policy implications for the 10 countries with the highest military expenses are provided at the end of the paper.

Testing the impact of real interest rate, income, and energy consumption on Turkey's CO2 emissions.

This paper aims to explore the impact of real interest rates (RIN), income, trade, foreign direct investment (FDI), and energy consumption on Turkey's carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) over the period from 1980 to 2014. This study differs from the existing literature by introducing a new discussion in the determination of environmental degradation, namely real interest rate. Hatemi-J (HJ) cointegration with two structural breaks and the newly developed Bayer-Hanck (BH) combined cointegration tests are used to enhance and support the robustness of the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test. The Granger causality test within the vector error correction model (VECM) is employed to examine the causality direction among the variables in both the short and long run. The empirical results demonstrate that RIN negatively effects CO2 emissions. This impact is also supported through energy, income, and FDI channels. It is suggested that policy makers should promote the stability of the real interest rates channel to reduce CO2 emissions and encourage the renewable energy investment through the production of electricity using renewable sources.