Investigating the Role of Education, Foreign Investment, and Economic Development for Sustainable Environment in BRI Countries: Application of Method of Movements Quantile Regression

Abstract

Environmental pollution comes from several sectors of activities. It is almost conceivable that the education sector subsidies to the disruption of the environmental quality. The study employs panel cointegration techniques and method of moments quantile regression (MMQR) to inspect the influence of income, education (scholarly enrollment and expenditure), and foreign direct investment on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for a panel of 46 Belt and Road initiative (BRI) countries spanning the period 1996–2016. The estimation shows that the hypothesis of environmental Kuznets is established for both the models. Using fully modified ordinary least squares (OLS), fixed effects OLS and dynamic OLS, long-run elasticities show that real income increases the emissions. At the same time, foreign direct investment and education contribute toward decreasing the emissions in the long run. Using the approach of MMQR, the estimated coefficients confirm that only economic growth positively affects pollution. However, education and foreign direct investment negatively influence CO2 emissions with different quantile levels. As policy recommendations, governments of the BRI region should improve the educational services by installing new technologies, equipment, and supplies, which leads to mitigation of the emission levels.