“…Our empirical findings for UMICs confirm, in general, that real economic activity increases CO 2 emissions in these countries (Ahmed & Shimada, 2019 ; Bhat, 2018 ; Ummalla & Goyari, 2020 ), in particular regarding the positive effect running from government expenditures to CO 2 (Carlsson & Lundström, 2001 ; Fan et al, 2020 ), from international trade to CO 2 (Wu et al, 2021a , 2021b ), and from investment expenditures to CO 2 (Nugraha & Osman, 2018 ; Shahbaz et al, 2020 ). Our findings for LMICs also confirm, in general, that real economic activity increases CO 2 emissions in these countries (Antonakakis et al, 2017 ; Ben Jebli et al, 2020 ; Ehigiamusoe & Lean, 2019 ; Halkos & Gkampoura, 2021 ; Zaman & Moemen, 2017 ), specifically confirming the positive effect running from imports to CO 2 (Alola & Joshua, 2020 ) and from FDI to CO 2 (Lau et al, 2018 ; Shi et al, 2020 ).…”