Information and communication technology (ICT) and environmental sustainability: a panel data analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on carbon dioxide emissions for a panel of 91 countries over the period 1990 to 2017. The study constructs an ICT index through principal component analysis and tests for the presence of cross-sectional dependence (CSD) in the data. The study employs pooled ordinary least squares, fixed-effects model, and system-generalized method of moments estimation techniques with panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) to tackle the issues of CSD in the data. The findings of the study show that ICT reduces CO 2 emissions for the full sample of countries. However, the comparative study of developed and developing countries depicts that ICT encourages environmental sustainability in developed countries whereas opposite results are found for developing countries. Moreover, presence of the environmental Kuznets curve is confirmed for the full sample as well as for developed and developing countries. It suggests that with higher levels of development of a country, it would be possible to contribute towards environmental sustainability along with ICT diffusion. Therefore, the outcome of this study may be helpful for policymaker and policies may be designed to encourage ICT investments in developing countries, as ICT will take care of environmental sustainability with higher levels of development.

The Impact of Innovation and Information Technology on Greenhouse Gas Emissions: A Case of the Visegrád Countries

“…The findings proved that production activities provoked degradation of the environment and imbalances of the ecosystem. Traditionally, scientists (including Kuznets 1955;Bilan et al 2019;Dementyev and Kwilinski 2020;Kwilinski et al 2020b;Vasylieva et al 2019;Khan et al 2020) described such a relationship using the quadratic function:…”

“…They also proved that a decline of corruption allowed a reduction in air pollutions. Khan et al (2020) proved that ICT in green infrastructure allowed cutting GHG emissions. The summary of the approaches to estimate the link among ICT, economic growth and GHG emissions is showed in Table 1.…”

ICT for sustainable development: Global comparative evidence of globalisation thresholds

“…ICT can therefore have negative or positive effects on environmental sustainability depending on specificities. This has prompted many scholars to argue for an inverted U-curve nexus between the two concepts (Higón et al, 2017;Zhang and Meng, 2019;Khan et al, 2020;Chien et al, 2021).…”

Z-Waste: Aplikasi Ramah Lingkungan Berbasis Mobile

“…Teknologi komunikasi dan informasi mendorong kelestarian lingkungan di negara maju, terutama pada kota-kota besar. Namun hasil yang sama tidak ditemukan pada negara berkembang, contohnya seperti Indonesia [2].…”