The effects of globalization on Ecological Footprints: an empirical analysis

By Lukas Figge, Kay Oebels, A. Offermans. Environment, Development and Sustainability, 2017

190 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Whether globalization is sustainable is a contested issue. The quantitative literature on the Maastricht Globalization Index (MGI) and the KOF index of globalization shows that globalization contributes positively to economic and human development, environmental performance, mortality, gender equality and physical integrity rights. However, globalization also drives within-country income inequality, especially in developing countries. Evidence on the effects of globalization on the ecological environment does not provide clear patterns; various dimensions of globalization have different effects on various pollutants. This article analyzes the statistical relationship between the most recent MGI (2012 edition) and the ecological dimension of sustainable development. The latter will be operationalized by considering four variants of the Ecological Footprint. The relation between globalization and sustainable development will be controlled for GDP per capita as a proxy for affluence and report the results for Pearson’s correlations and multivariate regressions for up to 171 countries. We conclude that the overall index of globalization significantly increases the Ecological Footprint of consumption, exports and imports. The decomposition of globalization into different domains reveals that apart from the political dimension, all dimensions drive human pressures and demands on the environment. Globalization needs to go into new directions if it is to make a contribution toward all aspects of sustainable development.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/35913204c5778a8b4ffcbc8c1f336bb696798741

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Citations in the corpus

The Role of Globalization, Economic Growth and Natural Resources on the Ecological Footprint in Thailand: Evidence from Nonlinear Causal Estimations (2021, background): “Studying the link between globalization and environment, Reference [6] examined the connection between ecological footprint and king of fighters (KOF) index of globalization.”
The Challenges and Opportunities in the Digitalization of Companies in a Post-COVID-19 World (2020, background): “The environmental dimension, which has signi ﬁ cantly suffered from globalization, may bene ﬁ t [16].”
Financial development, globalization and ecological footprint in G7: further evidence from threshold cointegration and fractional frequency causality tests (2020, background): “Human demand changes the ecosystem and causes climate change, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and pollution problems (Rudolph and Figge 2017).”