Moderation of Services’ EKC through Transportation Competitiveness: PQR Model in Global Prospective

Abstract

The continuously increasing GHG emissions have created environmental pollution and several challenges to ecosystems and biodiversity. The challenges of climate change are multipronged, resulting in melting glaciers, flash floods, and severe heat waves. In this regard, the adaptive and mitigation strategies to manage the consequences of climate change are highly important. The transport sector creates a quarter of carbon emissions, and this share is continuously increasing. Accordingly, this research study uses transport competitiveness to determine carbon emissions of the transport sector for 121 countries covering the time period from 2008 to 2018. The Panel Quantile Regression (PQR) technique is engaged to analyze the study results. The findings highlight that transport competitiveness tends to increase carbon emissions of the transport sector across quantile groups 1 and 3, while it reduces carbon emissions in quantile group 2. The U-shaped services’ EKC is validated in quantile groups 2 and 4. The moderation engaged, i.e., transportation competitiveness, changes the turning point of the services’ EKC across quantile groups 2 and 4. However, in the high-CO2 quantile group, the moderation impact of transport competitiveness is strongest as it reduces the sensitivity by flattening the services’ EKC. Furthermore, the planned expansion of the population and improved institutional quality tend to mitigate carbon emissions across different quantile groups. The policy relevance/implications that are based on the study results/findings are made part of the research paper.

Environmental Sustainability Analysis Using Moderation of Transport Competitiveness for Industrial-Induced EKC

“…The U shape EKC was validated for capital cities of China, Central Asia, BRICS countries, and West African countries for different periods and data sets (Jin and Kim, 2020). In the years 2022 and 2023, extensive work was done by researchers regarding the confirmation of EKC for various countries, states and provinces (Sardar et al, 2023).…”

“…Furthermore, the development of the transportation/logistics sector has backward and forward linkages in promoting tourism and its allied sectors (Kanwal et al, 2020). Despite the financial/economic and social gains/benefits of transportation sector development, the externalities in the form of environmental pollution by emitting carbon emissions pose serious environmental challenges (IEA, 2019;Sardar et al, 2023).…”