Pakistan Ecological Footprint and Major Driving Forces …
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would further compound its vulnerability to climate changes. The dirty practices
that exist in execution of farming practices such as application of chemicals both in
crop planting and fisheries, planting of rice in riverine and coastal areas deforestation
for constructions, herders’ activities and others poses environmental danger to the
sustainable development with regard to environmental impact.
Following the domineering of agriculture in the country’s profile of economic
operation and the loose policies to encourage investors, especially foreigners with
over reliance on fossil fuels as source of energy consumption, author seeks to investigate the vulnerability level of Pakistan to climate changes. Ecological footprint is
considered the correct indicator to measure the environment performance because
of the complexity of the sectors involved in this study. Few scholars have utilized
ecological footprint in their studies as a comprehensive measure of environmental
dilapidation and performance [3, 5, 9, 15, 19, 24, 28, 33, 37, 39, 40, 42]. This is
not the first study that has tried to investigate the environment performance with
ecological footprint, the only difference is in the choice of variable. Scholars have
used particular variables such as economic growth [27], globalization [33], and social
political factors [10] and tourism [22] to study the ecology. However, this study is
different from other works with the consideration of agricultural sector of Pakistan
which is considered as among the sustainable sectors of the country with much practices that exposes the environment to degradation. Also, FDI is considered among
the tentative sectors to induce environmental dilapidation of Pakistan considering the
loose hand in checkmating the excesses of the sector from the government policies.
Diverse scientific approaches such as Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL)-bound
testing, granger causality, and some diagnostic tests are utilized in this study to ensure
accuracy in the findings.
Previous studies have tried to investigate driving forces of ecological footprint
such as Charfeddine and Ben Khediri found that trade, economic growth, and urbanization impact negatively on the quality of environment: Kasman and Selman [21]
found economic growth and trade important forces in determining the quality of
environment and [27] found environment Kuznets curve for the countries for the
economic growth force, Solarin and Al-mulali, 2018 and Udemba et al. [38] for
foreign direct investment [22] for tourism force, and [33] for globalization.
The rest sections of this study are the theoretical background, data and methodology, results and empirical analyses, and conclusion.
2 Theoretical Background
The hypothetical background of this work is anchored on environmental Kuznets
curve (EKC) and pollution haven hypothesis (PHH). Environmental Kuznets curve
hence taken as EKC is first conceived and applied by Simeon Kuznets in his study
of income inequality between rural farmers and city employees. He found a turning
point that assures the closing of the income gap. Since then, some energy and environmental economists [20, 29] have adopted and applied same hypothesis in studying the
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would further compound its vulnerability to climate changes. The dirty practices
that exist in execution of farming practices such as application of chemicals both in
crop planting and fisheries, planting of rice in riverine and coastal areas deforestation
for constructions, herders’ activities and others poses environmental danger to the
sustainable development with regard to environmental impact.
Following the domineering of agriculture in the country’s profile of economic
operation and the loose policies to encourage investors, especially foreigners with
over reliance on fossil fuels as source of energy consumption, author seeks to investigate the vulnerability level of Pakistan to climate changes. Ecological footprint is
considered the correct indicator to measure the environment performance because
of the complexity of the sectors involved in this study. Few scholars have utilized
ecological footprint in their studies as a comprehensive measure of environmental
dilapidation and performance [3, 5, 9, 15, 19, 24, 28, 33, 37, 39, 40, 42]. This is
not the first study that has tried to investigate the environment performance with
ecological footprint, the only difference is in the choice of variable. Scholars have
used particular variables such as economic growth [27], globalization [33], and social
political factors [10] and tourism [22] to study the ecology. However, this study is
different from other works with the consideration of agricultural sector of Pakistan
which is considered as among the sustainable sectors of the country with much practices that exposes the environment to degradation. Also, FDI is considered among
the tentative sectors to induce environmental dilapidation of Pakistan considering the
loose hand in checkmating the excesses of the sector from the government policies.
Diverse scientific approaches such as Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL)-bound
testing, granger causality, and some diagnostic tests are utilized in this study to ensure
accuracy in the findings.
Previous studies have tried to investigate driving forces of ecological footprint
such as Charfeddine and Ben Khediri found that trade, economic growth, and urbanization impact negatively on the quality of environment: Kasman and Selman [21]
found economic growth and trade important forces in determining the quality of
environment and [27] found environment Kuznets curve for the countries for the
economic growth force, Solarin and Al-mulali, 2018 and Udemba et al. [38] for
foreign direct investment [22] for tourism force, and [33] for globalization.
The rest sections of this study are the theoretical background, data and methodology, results and empirical analyses, and conclusion.
2 Theoretical Background
The hypothetical background of this work is anchored on environmental Kuznets
curve (EKC) and pollution haven hypothesis (PHH). Environmental Kuznets curve
hence taken as EKC is first conceived and applied by Simeon Kuznets in his study
of income inequality between rural farmers and city employees. He found a turning
point that assures the closing of the income gap. Since then, some energy and environmental economists [20, 29] have adopted and applied same hypothesis in studying the