Investigating the nexus among transport, economic growth and environmental degradation: Evidence from panel ARDL approach

The topic of sustainable transportation has been debated among engineers and policymakers. On the one hand the transport sector plays a vital role in accelerating economic activities for economic development, but on the other hand it releases a vast amount of CO2, which adversely impacts the natural environment. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to determine the nexus among transport, economic growth and environmental degradation in the 10 Asian economies with highest CO2 emission from 1995 to 2017 by using multi-variate panel data analysis. This study includes the panel pool means group and auto-regressive distributed lag model to estimate the long-run relationship between variables. The result from the Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) causality test manifests that there is a unidirectional connection between transport and economic growth. Moreover, the result findings observe a unidirectional causality between transport and environmental degradation. Furthermore, the results manifest that there is an endogenous relationship between transport, economic growth and CO2 emission as well as environmental degradation is mainly influenced by the economic growth and transport sector. The empirical result from this study provided an overview of the attributes of CO2 emissions from the transport sector. The results not only help to advance the present literature but also can be of particular interest to policymakers.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the relationship between transportation, economic growth, and environmental degradation, finding a unidirectional connection between transport and economic growth, as well as between transport and environmental degradation. The study also reveals an endogenous relationship between transport, economic growth, and CO2 emissions, with environmental degradation mainly influenced by economic growth and the transport sector.