Abstract
Focusing on air emissions in South Korean provinces, we investigate whether economic growth has become greener since the implementation of the national green growth strategy in 2009. Given the relevance of regional elements in the economic and environmental policies, the focus lies on spatial aspects. That is, spillovers from nearby provinces are controlled for in a SLX model by means of the Han–Phillips estimator for dynamic panel data. Our results suggest mainly the existence of inverted N-shaped Environmental Kuznets curves for sulfur oxides (SOX) and total suspended particles (TSP). As the curves initially decrease strongly with increasing income, the main cleanup is achieved with the mean income level. However, abatement of the remaining TSP emissions only takes place at higher income levels. While the fixed effects estimations indicate that per capita SOX and TSP emissions have been significantly lower since 2009, the effects vanish once spatial interactions are taken into account and no evidence is found that regional economic growth has become greener. Apart from economic growth, population density and energy consumption are the main drivers of emission changes, with the latter having robust spatial spillovers. The respective spatial interactions decrease with increasing distance and become insignificant after 150 km.
Highlights
Korea’s miraculous development into a high-income economy was driven by a rapid industrialization and strong export orientation
In the light of the relatively high air emission levels and the importance of regional aspects in the green growth strategy, we analyzed the effect of economic growth on SOX and total suspended particles (TSP) emissions in Korea, utilizing province-level data
While the remaining SOX emissions are relatively low at higher income levels, a high income seems to be required until the relatively high remaining TSP emissions are abated
Summary
Korea’s miraculous development into a high-income economy was driven by a rapid industrialization and strong export orientation. Given the importance of industrial clusters in Korea in general as well as of regional initiatives in the green growth strategy, this paper provides new spatial econometric evidence of the growth effects on air emissions for a country that has rarely been explored at the regional level. For this reason, we analyze data on 16 province-level divisions..
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