Environmental Kuznets curve among BRICS countries: Spot lightening finance, transport, energy and growth factors

Abstract

The environmental sustainability reforms considered the highly successful factor for the countries that devoted for green investment in transportation, financial activities, energy demand, and growth factors. This challenging task is monetized by fair environmental policies that integrated with the countries action plans. BRICS countries is no exception, that wider accepted this environmental task and provoked the need of healthy investment for sustainable growth. This study reviewed finance, transport, energy, and growth factors under Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) framework in a panel of BRICS countries by utilizing a consistent time series data from 1990 to 2015. The study employed panel fixed effect regression to observe unmodeled heterogeneity among the cross-section identifiers that vary over a period of time. The results show that transport services and industry value added (INDVAD) both escalate fossil fuel (FFUEL) energy consumption while financial factors, environmental prices, and renewable energy consumption (REC) decreases fossil energy in a region. Bank capital, broad money supply, domestic credit, railways goods transported, travel services, and INDVAD considerably increases nitrous oxide emissions (N2O) whereas; REC significantly decreases N2O emissions in a panel of countries. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions affected by domestic credit, railways goods transported, travel services, and INDVAD. There is a monotonic decreasing relationships between i) per capita income and FFUEL energy, ii) railways passenger carried and N2O emissions, iii) REC and GHG emissions, and iv) income and N2O emissions, whereas; there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between broad money supply and N2O emissions and U-shaped relationships between per capita income and GHG emissions. The panel causality tests confirmed the bidirectional relationship between financial indicators and railways transportation, while bank capital Granger cause FFUEL energy, per capita income, INDVAD, and REC (but not other way around) in a panel of BRICS countries. The inter-temporal relationships show that bank capital, INDVAD, and price level will largely affect FFUEL energy, N2O emissions, and GHG emissions respectively, for the next 10 years period. The results of the study emphasized the need of ‘green policy instruments’ that should be connected with the country's policies and program for sustained growth.