Global Summit on Advances in Earth Science and Climate Change, Paris, France, 15 - 16 September 2022, pp.28-29
This study aims
to investigate why some countries are cleaner than the others with reference to
macroeconomic governance (MEG) in order to explain how major macroeconomic
aggregates should be governed to mitigate environmental pollution at the level
of economic systems. Using per capita carbon dioxide emissions (CPC) as the
proxy for air pollution, and macro-non-financial governance (MNFG) and
macro-financial governance (MFG) as the proxies for MEG, the study introduces
the systemic and fragmented governance of green complementarities (GCMs) and
dirty complementarities (DCMs) as analytic concepts to compare the MEG models
for managing pollution in 13 high-income countries (HICs), 10
upper-middle-income countries (UMICs), and nine lower-middle-income countries
(LMICs) for the period 1994–2014. The paper has two major points in selecting
an econometric technique for the estimation of the pollution–macroeconomy
nexus. The first is to estimate the long-run and short-run causal relationships
between pollution and macroeconomic governance. The second point is to make a
holistic analysis of the pollution–macroeconomy, as noted above. The
econometric technique to cover the two points noted above is panel data
cointegration that estimates, first, the long-run and short-run relationships,
and second, in a multivariate setting. The paper concludes that (i) HICs
reduced their CPC levels thanks to adopting green systemic governance by
creating GCMs between both MNFG and MFG variables in the long run; (ii) UMICs
experienced a remarkable increase in their CPC levels due to adopting dirty
systemic governance by creating DCMs between the MNFG variables, but prevented
pollution from being higher through creating GCMs between the MFG variables;
and (iii) LMICs experienced the highest comparative increase in CPC due to
adopting a fragmented governance in managing both MNFG–pollution and MFG–pollution
nexus.