Moving a step closer towards environmental sustainability in Asian countries: focusing on real income, urbanization, transport infrastructure, and research and development

Environmental pollution has become the matter of concern all over the world with the increase in urbanization, transport, industrialization and several other factors. The researcher has therefore designed this study to investigate the impact of urbanization, research and development R&D expenditure, infrastructure development and real income on the emission of carbon dioxide in Asian countries. The data collection process involved six Asian countries from 1997 and ending 2019. The panel data estimation and analysis tools and techniques were applied on the collected data and the results were obtained. The results of regression estimation suggest that as per MG estimator, all the variables have significant and positive impact on CO₂ emission but infrastructure development has insignificant impact. In case of FMOLS, again all the variables have significant and positive impact on CO₂ emission but infrastructure development has insignificant impact. However, in case of DOLS, all the variables have shown significant impact on CO₂ emission. In the last, DK estimator indicates that urbanization, real income and population density have significant and positive impact on CO₂ emission but R&D expenditure and infrastructure development has insignificant impact. In this way, the impacts of all independent and control variables on CO₂ emission were estimated.