Does Globalization Asymmetrically Affect CO2 Emissions in Pakistan? A New Evidence through NARDL Approach

Abstract

The study examines the impact of globalization and institutional quality on environmental degradation in Pakistan. The study employs symmetric and asymmetric Autoregressive Distributed Lag Model (ARDL) at a time to check the linear and nonlinear effect of globalization on the environment over 1985 to 2017. The long-run findings of linear ARDL shows globalization affect positively to the environment and all other control variables FDI, GDP are significant with a positive sign while institutional quality and the interaction term of globalization and institutional quality is significant with a negative sign. The study also finds the marginal effect of interaction term and found that globalization has a different effect on the environment with different level of institutional quality. The linear ARDL model is not suitable to check the asymmetric behaviour of globalization on the environment. For this, the study applied a nonlinear ARDL estimation method. The findings of the nonlinear ARDL model showed the asymmetric behaviour of globalization on the environment. This study provides a new direction by proving the asymmetric relationship of globalization on environment quality that is more beneficial for policymakers and government officials.