Exploring the impacts of education and unemployment on CO2 emissions

Abstract

The role of human capital and unemployment has been debated in a limited number of empirical studies that have aimed to study the discipline of environmental sustainability. Therefore, by Employing a reliable autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model approach, this study examines the dynamic linkage between education, unemployment, and CO2 emissions, by using the Chinese economy’s dataset from the time period pertaining to 1991–2020. The vivacious side of human capital shows that variables such as literacy rate and the average year of schooling curb CO2 emissions in the long run. Moreover, Human capital results are also based on facts in terms of their magnitude and direction. Also, empirical findings have unfolded that unemployment significantly increases CO2 emissions in the long-run. However, the short-run has estimated that the coefficients of education and unemployment provide similar results. Based on these novel findings, a wide set of economic policies are required and hence suggested for maintaining the environmental quality.