The rapid economic growth observed in Central European countries in the last thirty years has been the result of profound political changes and economic liberalization. This growth is partly connected with reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. However, the problem of CO2 emissions seems to remain unresolved. The aim of this paper is to test whether the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis holds true for Central European countries in an annual sample data that covers 1995–2016 in most countries. We examine cointegration by applying the Autoregressive Distributed Lag bound testing. This is the first study examining the relationship between CO2 emissions and economic growth in individual Central European countries from a long-run perspective, which allows the results to be compared. We confirmed the cointegration, but our estimates confirmed the EKC hypothesis only in Poland. It should also be noted that in all nine countries, energy consumption leads to increased CO2 emissions. The long-run elasticity ranges between 1.5 in Bulgaria and 2.0 in Croatia. We observed exceptionally low long-run elasticity in Estonia (0.49). Our findings suggest that to solve the environmental degradation problem in Central Europe, it is necessary to individualize the policies implemented in the European Union.

South Asian countries have seen remarkable economic growth and development in the past few decades. This has been driven by financial sector reforms, industrialization, and expansion of foreign trade. The present study is designed to identify the long- and short-run relationships among environmental degradation, economic growth, energy consumption, and trade openness in the South Asian region. Our research contributes to the literature by employing a new approach (the NARDL method). We examine annual data for four South Asian countries between 1971 and 2014. We found that there was a long-run equilibrium relationship between environmental degradation, economic growth, energy consumption, and trade openness. The results confirmed the inverted U-shaped EKC hypothesis only for India and Pakistan. However, the long-term coefficients related to energy consumption were statistically significant only in Pakistan. The most interesting finding was that only in Sri Lanka did the long-run coefficients associated with trade openness shocks significantly impact carbon dioxide emissions. These impacts were based on the scale effect. Our study has some policy implications. Foremost, the governments of South Asian countries should promote and subsidize green energy use by increasing R&D spending on renewable energy.

Nowadays, increased urbanization is visible in most European Union countries. At the same time, it can be noticed that in the studied period (2000–2018), GDP per capita increased, and CO2 emissions per capita and energy consumption per capita decreased. These trends should be assessed in an unequivocally positive way. Considering these trends, especially with regard to economic development, our research goal is to answer the following questions: is there a long-run relationship between urbanization, energy consumption, economic growth, and carbon dioxide emissions, and what roles do urbanization and energy consumption play in the concept of the environmental Kuznets curve? This study aims to contribute to this growing area of research by exploring the European Union countries in the period covering the accession of new member states from Central Europe that needs intensifying European environmental policy. In order to test cointegration, we used Pedroni and Westerlund’s panel tests. To estimate the long-run coefficients, we employed the FMOLS, MG, CCEMG, and AMG tests. Our findings confirmed the long-run relationship between variables. We find that urbanization has a high negative impact on carbon dioxide emissions per capita. Interestingly, our studies’ results differ from those in most of the previously published articles about European countries. For this reason, our results provide a new insight for policymakers in European Union institutions.

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Celem artykułu jest odpowiedź na pytanie badawcze, czy zwiększenie eksportu z krajów rozwijających się wiąże się z poprawą jakości ich środowiska. W artykule zastosowano metody krytycznej analizy literatury oraz analizy danych statystycznych. Wyniki przeprowadzonych badań wskazują, że jakość środowiska w krajach rozwijających się, uzyskujących wysokie dochody z handlu zagranicznego, może się poprawić w wyniku zastosowania eko-innowacyjnych technologii. Ponadto handel może wpływać pozytywnie na środowisko, ponieważ zwiększenie eksportu maksymalizuje dochód, co z kolei powiększa dochód per capita, a następnie – zgodnie z koncepcją środowiskowej krzywej Kuznetsa – zmniejsza w długim okresie degradację środowiska.