Does Economic Development Have a Causal Relationship With Environmental Degradation?: Experience From Different Income Group Countries

Introduction

Global economics are pursing rival strategies to achieve high economic growth and development as giving low emphasis on environmental development (Singh et al., 2019). Most countries increased their dependency on foreign trade, foreign direct investment, science & technological development, strict intellectual property right rule, information and communication technology (ICT), digitalization, technology transfer and commercialization, market innovation, financial development, industrialization, and entrepreneurship ecosystem to attain high economic growth. The process of high economic growth can be accomplished through increasing production scale in all sectors which apply large quantity of energy, material and natural resources. Therefore, it may be caused to increase environmental degradation and exhaustion of natural resources (Stern et al., 1996; Uddin et al., 2016; Firdous et al., 2023). Urbanization, industrialization and infrastructural development are positive to increase economic development (Hossain, 2012; Ali et al., 2021; Wang et al., 2023). Although, greenhouse gases (GHGs) emissions in the atmosphere increased in large quantity due to overwhelming urbanization, population growth, industrialization, infrastructural development and labour migration from rural to urban area (Singh & Issac, 2018; Jafari et al. 2012; Xuezhou et al., 2021; Shah et al., 2021; Singh et al., 2022b). Evidence based on past scientific studies inferred that extensive quantity of GHGs emission in the atmosphere is a prime cause to increase environmental degradation. The occurrence of climate change, global warming and variability in climatic factors increased at unprecedented rate due to rising quantity of GHGs (Esquivias et al., 2023). Consequently, agriculture productivity (Kumar & Sharma, 2014), yield of food-grain and cash crops (Singh & Jyoti, 2021), food security (Kumar et al., 2015c), sustainable livelihood security (Singh & Issac, 2018), income of farmers (Kumar et al., 2015a), production of industries (Singh et al., 2017b) and level of employment are also negatively influenced due to climate change.

At present every country desire to increase standard of living, income, livelihood and food security, social development and human development through high economic development. Therefore, to sustaining the common property of environmental and ecosystem services is a challenge for global countries. While, most developing economies are unable to protect environmental and natural resources due to low economic growth, extreme poverty, low per capita income, high income inequality, food and nutritional insecurity, high unemployment rate, high population growth, low up-gradation of science & technology, low-technological skills, poor health of people and low entrepreneurial skills of people (Kumar et al., 2016; Singh & Ashraf, 2020; Singh et al., 2020). Therefore, the group of developing countries can resolve aforementioned issues through a high economic growth (Singh et al., 2019; Singh & Kumar, 2022b). Furthermore, most developing countries could not develop appropriate technology, green technology and digital technologies which can be used in production activities to reduce environmental degradation (Ashraf & Singh, 2021; Singh et al., 2022a). These economies, therefore, are using more natural and ecosystem services to complete the basic needs of economic growth and development. Also, strict environmental laws and practices of green management may be unfavourable for developing countries due to their low position in economic development promoting factors. For instance, many developing countries do not have appropriate infrastructure of schooling, medical, business, R&D, banking, and information ICT, etc. These countries, therefore, cannot abate GHGs emissions form production sectors to reduce environmental deterioration.