Abstract
Long-term exposure to haze pollution will not only affect citizens’ health and shorten their life expectancy, but also cause unpredictable economic losses. In addition, it has become the focus of worldwide concern whether and how institutional quality affects haze pollution. In this study, we explored the impacts of political corruption on haze pollution in 139 global countries. We employed a geographical detector model to identify the driving factors of spatial differentiation in global haze pollution. In addition, corruption degree and per capita gross domestic production (GDP) were used as threshold variables to analyze whether there is a nonlinear relationship between corruption and haze pollution. The main results are as follows. (1) The corruption perception index (CPI) was negatively correlated with haze pollution and had a strong and stable explanatory power for the heterogeneity of haze pollution. Besides, the degree of corruption had a significant triple threshold effect on haze pollution. When the CPI crossed the double threshold value, strengthening institutional quality could inhibit haze pollution. (2) Per capita GDP significantly determined how institutional quality exerted an effect on haze pollution, which was also a key factor affecting spatial heterogeneity of PM2.5 concentration. In high-income countries, choosing a more honest ruling party could substantially reduce haze pollution, while in low-income countries, an incompetent government could increase the degree of haze pollution. (3) The “Matthew effect” was manifested in our study. It indicated that the higher was the level of economic development, the lower was the severity of haze pollution. Based on these results, we state that policy makers cannot simply alleviate haze pollution through anti-corruption construction. For low-income countries, ensuring economic growth is the prerequisite for the substantial alleviation of haze pollution. On the contrary, high-income countries should pay more attention to the integrity of government institutions and strengthen the awareness of anti-corruption.
Highlights
Air pollution poses a huge challenge to the health of the world’s inhabitants [1,2,3]
The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis has been verified in some countries, most countries are currently in the stage of a negative correlation between economic development and haze pollution in terms of global development trends
In addition to corruption perception index (CPI) and gross domestic production (GDP), the natural environment accounted for the difference in haze pollution, and the explanation is maintained at about 10%, which shows that afforestation is the key method to alleviate haze pollution
Summary
Air pollution poses a huge challenge to the health of the world’s inhabitants [1,2,3]. A panel threshold model was used to explore the moderating effects of corruption degree and economic development level on PM2.5 pollution, fully considering the heterogeneity between countries, and the results are universal. As an environmental problem plaguing many countries, has attracted much attention from researchers Research on this topic from the perspective of institutional quality is still incomplete, and whether national corruption affects a country’s haze pollution is a question that remains to be explored. A threshold model of corruption’s effect on haze pollution was constructed in this study to explore the nonlinear effect and to further consider the differences in the impact of corruption on haze pollution in countries with different levels of economic development
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