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ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Greening Global Competitiveness: Analyzing
the Environmental Kuznets Curve in
Developing Economies in the Light of
Economic Fitness and Global Integration
1
School of Logistics, Chengdu University of Information Technology, Chengdu, Sichuan 610103, China
2
Department of Economics, Division of Management and Administrative Science, University of Education Lahore, Pakistan
3
School of Economics and Finance, Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
Submission date: 2024-06-24
Final revision date: 2024-09-04
Acceptance date: 2024-10-13
Online publication date: 2025-03-14
Publication date: 2025-11-04
Corresponding author
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2025;34(6):7895-7908
KEYWORDS
TOPICS
ABSTRACT
Human life is greatly affected by increasing globalization, which has strong environmental
implications in developing nations. Moreover, nations have experienced major transformations in their
production structures to maintain their competitive positions in the global market. Therefore, this study
aims to analyze the individual and synergistic impacts of globalization (GLOB) and economic fitness
(ECF) on CO2 emissions in light of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis in developing
nations. The panel corrected standard error and system generalized moments methods have provided
robust evidence for the existence of the EKC hypothesis based on a panel of 79 developing nations from
1995 to 2019. Moreover, GLOB (=0.60, p<0.01) and ECF (= 0.003, p<0.01) had a significant and positive
impact on CO2 emissions. They concluded that diversified exports, trade openness, and economic
expansion in developing nations cause high emissions. In contrast, the model revealed a significant
and positive (= 0.082, p<0.01) impact of the interaction term (ECF*GLOB). It was observed that ECF
moderates the impact of GLOB on CO2 emissions, as high ECF in economies increases their GLOB by
increasing production scale to enhance their trade, which leads to environmental degradation. However,
the findings also show that developing nations have experienced earlier turning points as compared to the
baseline model and their individual impact on ECK trajectories because ECF and GLOB simultaneously
expand production scale and trade volume. Thus, developing nations must develop strong institutional
frameworks with strict implementation and enforcement of environmental regulations, environmentally
oriented trade policies, sustainable infrastructure, and environment-oriented international cooperation
to obtain a favorable impact of ECF and GLOB on domestic environmental quality.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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