This research is employed to examine the environmental issues embedded in Belt & Road Initiative (BRI), to be more specific: testify which of these hypotheses: Pollution Havens Hypothesis, Pollution Halo Hypothesis, Environmental Kuznets Curve is in accordance with the current development condition of BRI counties; whether there exists a bidirectional relationship among Ecological Footprint, Gross Domestic Production, Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Belt & Road Initiative countries. In this paper, Panel Vector Autoregression is utilized to analyze a dataset of 44-member countries in this initiative, ranges from 1990 to 2016, to empirically testify the environmental evaluation of this project. Results are analyzed on both long-run and short-run cases through Orthogonalized Impulse-Response Functions (IRF). This research displays a great heterogeneity among different target variables, FDI as a main variable of interest does not expose a bidirectional relationship with Ecological Footprint, only Ecological Footprint demonstrates robust influence on FDI. In addition, Pollution Havens Hypothesis is certified to be true for FDI and GDP among Belt & Road Initiative member countries.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.