Why are some countries cleaner than others? New evidence from macroeconomic governance

Abstract

This study aims to investigate why some countries are cleaner than the others with reference to macroeconomic governance (MEG) in order to explain how major macroeconomic aggregates should be governed to mitigate environmental pollution at the level of economic systems. Using per capita carbon dioxide emissions (CPC) as the proxy for air pollution, and macro-non-financial governance (MNFG) and macro-financial governance (MFG) as the proxies for MEG, the study introduces the systemic and fragmented governance of green complementarities (GCMs) and dirty complementarities (DCMs) as analytic concepts to compare the MEG models for managing pollution in 13 high-income countries (HICs), 10 upper-middle-income countries (UMICs), and nine lower-middle-income countries (LMICs) for the period 1994–2014. The paper has two major points in selecting an econometric technique for the estimation of the pollution–macroeconomy nexus. The first is to estimate the long-run and short-run causal relationships between pollution and macroeconomic governance. The second point is to make a holistic analysis of the pollution–macroeconomy, as noted above. The econometric technique to cover the two points noted above is panel data cointegration that estimates, first, the long-run and short-run relationships, and second, in a multivariate setting. The paper concludes that (i) HICs reduced their CPC levels thanks to adopting green systemic governance by creating GCMs between both MNFG and MFG variables in the long run; (ii) UMICs experienced a remarkable increase in their CPC levels due to adopting dirty systemic governance by creating DCMs between the MNFG variables, but prevented pollution from being higher through creating GCMs between the MFG variables; and (iii) LMICs experienced the highest comparative increase in CPC due to adopting a fragmented governance in managing both MNFG–pollution and MFG–pollution nexus.