Modelling Urbanization, Economic Growth, and Ecological Footprint Using Environment Kuznets' Curve in Selected Asian Countries

1. Introduction

In economic history, the relationship between environment and economic growth gradually caught attention of the researchers with soil degradation in 1930 and air pollution during 1950-60 (Jiang, et al., 2020). In late 20^th century, it was accepted that environment sustainability through use of natural resources is the biggest challenge for the process of economic growth. Therefore, for global economy, environment is considered as an important factor to shape the economic development. There exists complex relationship between environment and economic growth especially in relation to causes and impacts of each other. Various research studies in literature have demonstrated the positive as well as negative relationship of economic growth with the environment (Dong & Karmacharya, 2018), (Lin, et al., 2017) & (Shahbaz, et al., 2016). This impact depends upon the degree of use of natural resources and release of pollutant from the use of those resources. Not only this, human activities highly impact earths’ climate and ecosystem. Therefore, increasing population and urbanization can be considered as the key factors affecting the environment. In the previous chapter, it is found that there exists U-shaped relationship between urbanization and environment in selected Asian countries for this study. It depicts that at initial level, there is positive relationship between urbanization and environment quality but at later stages, this relationship becomes negative with increase in rate of urbanization. This research study aims at comparing selected Asian countries based on the relationship between urbanization, economic growth and environment degradation using Environment Kuznets Curve.