The impact of economic development on environmental degradation in Qatar

Abstract

This study investigates the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis by employing the ecological footprint (EF) as an indicator of environmental degradation in Qatar over the 1980–2011 period. The results of the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) estimation with structural breaks reveal that there is a long run relationship among the selected variables with a significant shift in the cointegration vector in 1996. The comparison of the short and long-run income elasticities indicates that the EKC hypothesis is not valid in Qatar. In particular, the long run effect of income is greater than its short run effect, which provides evidence of a monotonic relationship between EF and real GDP per capita. Moreover, the oil price and trade openness have a positive and negative long run impact on ecological footprint, respectively. We further investigate the robustness of the results by employing the Toda–Yamamoto causality tests and the estimation with regime approach. The outcome of TY shows that income and oil price increase significantly the ecological footprint. Moreover, the results of the estimation with two regimes (1980–1996 and 1997–2011) show that the impact of real GDP on the EF in the second regime is higher than the first regime, which confirm the ARDL estimation results.