Along with the continuous development of the global economy, environmental deterioration has been widely recognized as a pressing issue nowadays, bringing environmental governance to the forefront of human survival. Asia, the largest continent in world in terms of both landmass size and population, has long been facing the exhaustive challenge of environmental pollution. We empirically prove that the level of environmental governance, proxied by government expenditure on environmental protection as a share of gross domestic product (GDP), exerts significant impacts on environmental conditions among Asian countries. For Asian countries, basically three main conclusions can be drawn that may be useful for improving the condition of environmental quality: (i) the authority should increase the share of government expenditure on environmental protection, since it contributes significantly to the reduction of CO 2 emissions and the promotion of energy efficiency; (ii) the government should make an effort to control the overheating economic growth, since excessive economic growth is detrimental to the environment, and increasing GDP per capita leads to increasing CO 2 emissions, decreasing energy efficiency, and decreasing comprehensive environmental performance; and (iii) although foreign direct investment has no impact on CO 2 emissions and Environmental Performance Index, it exerts a significantly negative impact on energy intensity and thus promotes an effect on energy efficiency; therefore, we recommend that the government should implement relevant policies to attract more foreign investment.

The existence and the direction of the relationship between globalization and real GDP (RGDP) are very debatable. By employing annual data of 92 countries from 1970 to 2011, we apply Pedroni’s [Econometric Theory, 20, (2004) 597–625] panel cointegration test and the panel vector autoregressions (VARs) model, proposed by Love and Zicchino [Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance, 46(2), (2006) 190–210], to investigate again the relationship between these two variables. The results first present the weak evidence of cointegration between RGDP and overall globalization and its three main sub-indices. Second, the empirical evidence shows a bidirectional causality between RGDP and overall globalization, economic as well as social, but higher political globalization harms RGDP in the sample countries. Hence, we offer evidence for a clear bidirectional effect between RGDP and each globalization index in Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, but not in non-OECD ones. Several empirical implications and suggestions are proposed through our observations.