“…This relationship is commonly referred to as the EKC hypothesis. Several researchers have validated the EKC hypothesis for different economies, including but not limited to, Iberia (Moutinho, Madaleno, & Bento, 2020); China (Jiang, Yang, & Ma, 2019;Mushtaq, Chen, Din, Ahmad, & Zhang, 2020;Zhou et al, 2018); India (Dar & Asif, 2017); Pakistan (Ur Rahman, Chongbo, & Ahmad, 2019); USA (Alola & Alola, 2019);Brazil (Ben Jebli & Ben Youssef, 2019); emerging economies (Wawrzyniak & Doryń, 2020); NAFTA and BRIC (Rahman, Cai, Khattak, & Hasan, 2019); Ukraine (Melnyk, Kubatko, & Kubatko, 2016); SEE economies (Obradović & Lojanica, 2017); developed and developing economies (Anser et al, 2020);and OECD (Manzoor Ahmad, Khan, Rahman, Khattak, & Khan, 2019).…”