The Role of Foreign Direct Investment, Agriculture, and Urbanization in Achieving Environmental Sustainability: Insight from an Emerging Economy

This study strives to empirically examine the success or failure of different economic activities on environmental sustainability of Turkey over a given period of time. The abstract is organized based on different abstracts from three (3) distinct research by the author. In chapter two of this study, the time-varying impact of foreign direct investment on environmental sustainability targets amidst global economic downturn was examined. To achieve this, a time-varying parameter approach was employed to investigate the impacts of increased foreign direct investment on environmental degradation amidst global economic downturn for the period 1970–2017. Results showed that the inflow of foreign direct investment (FDI), energy use, urbanization, and real income has led to environmental problems in Turkey. Thus recommended that the government enact policies that emphasize green FDI inflows, tighten environmental policies that deter the immigration of dirty production processes, ensure domestic investors to adhere strictly to the nation’s environmental policies, and enact policies to foster mutual cooperation and understanding between the local and foreign stakeholders in a manner that drives the use of energy-saving technologies in production activities and the use of renewables in place of fossil fuels to control environmental hazards for both the immediate and future generations. In addition, this third chapter aimed to examine the linkage among agriculture, energy use, economic performance and FDI with environmental sustainability. To this end, ecological footprint has been considered as a more comprehensive and reliable indicator to measure the level of environmental degradation. This relationship has been investigated with different approaches such as the Residual Augmented Least Squares Augmented Dickey-Fuller (RALS-ADF), Residual Augmented Least Squares Engle and Granger (RALS-EG) and leveraged bootstrap causality test for the period from 1970 to 2017. The findings confirmed that all the variables investigated have cointegration relationship and have positive and statistically significant effect on environmental degradation in Turkey. Therefore, our findings provide insights for policymakers to consider investigated variables as a surest way to have environmental sustainability. Finally, the fourth chapter aimed at examining the nexus among urbanization, energy use, foreign direct investment, economic growth and environmental sustainability in Turkey from 1970 to 2017. The analyses were carried out applying the Residual Augmented Least Squares analysis. The results revealed that urbanization and energy use deteriorate the environment, FDI inflow and GDP growth contributes to environmental sustainability in Turkey. The study suggests that to achieve sustainable urbanization, policymakers in Turkey should execute well-planned urbanization programs, create an energy conservation policy and encourage green industries to ensure a sustainable increase in environmental quality for Turkey