Ticaret ve çevre arasındaki ilişkinin incelenmesi

After adopting liberal economic policies, many developed and developing countries have experienced rapid economic development in 1960s. With the rising environmental awareness in industrial economies in the 1960s, environmental regulations, especially pollution regulations, started to become stricter. But this tightening of the regulations remained slight and regional and unfortunately, the human race seemed to look on the environmental deteriorations for a quite long time.After this worldwide ignorance for the environment, in developed regions the concerns for the pollution intensities increased and developed countries were in search of an international cooperation. Consequently, United Nation?s first major conference on international environmental issues was carried out at Stockholm, Sweden in 1972.The existing circumstances of the world causes the developed countries? residents desire for a better/greener environment to live in. With the regional sanctions like European Unions Environmental Policy, the mostly developed countries decrease their emission levels with the help of strict environmental regulations, in order to obey the rules.These circumstances in developed countries appeared to cause the pollution intensive industries to find theirselves places where the environmental regulations are relatively laxer, or places where no environmental regulations exist. These places exist mostly in developing or less developed regions. In this manner, the developed regions become cleaner and developing regions load up the burden of the pollutions of the developed regions.At this point, the Environmental Kuznets Curve and the Pollution Haven Hypotheses attract attentions of the researchers worldwide.In order to examine the relationship between environment and international trade, the two investigations of the two important hypotheses in the literature have been merged. Like the recent studies, we investigate the both hypotheses in this study.The reason why we merged the two investigations of these two hypotheses in the literature is that, the recent literature of Environmental Kuznets Curve has added the examinations of the Pollution Haven Hypothesis into the studies.Like the recent studies in the literature, the panel-data sets were used in order to control for unobserved heterogeneityThe regression results and the graphs for the Model 1 indeed show that, a worldwide EKC is unreachable. As we can see from the graphs, both worldwide per capita CO2 emissions and the per capita GDP are increasing. Thus, it is impossible to find a EKC for worldwide. According to EKC hypothesis, the expected signs of per-capita GDP and per-capita GDP-squared are positive and negative, respectively. But as we can see the Fixed- Effects results, both of the signs are positive. Even they are statistically significant, there is no such EKC effect worldwide.The regression results for Model 2 show us statistically insignificant evidence of EKC for developed countries. The signs of per-capita GDP, per-capita GDP-squared and per-capita GDP-cubed are positive, negative and positive, respectively. Unfortunately, we didn?t find evidence of EKC. The graphs of the countries were drawn separately for each developed country in order to see the country-specific statuses of the developed countries.As we can see from the country-specific graphs, in most of the developed countries, per-capita CO2 levels have a decreasing trend. For Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Netherlands, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom and United States we can see that decreasing trends evidently.Except for Israel, Singapore and United States, most of these countries are members of European Union (E.U.). With regard to EU?s environmental stringencies, we may conclude that, being a member/part of an institution might be forcing countries to control their emission levels.When we examine these countries as country groups (High Income Countries, High Income OCED Countries and High Income non-OCED countries) we can see that increasing trend in per-capita CO2 has slowed down.Expect for Japan, in every developed country, per-capita GDPs have increasing trend.We can see EKC-likely trends for Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Singapore, Sweden, United Kingdom, and United States.The Fixed-Effects results of 25 developing countries in Model 3 show that, the signs of the per-capita GDP, per-capita GDP-squared and per-capita GDP-cubed are as expected but per-capita GDP-squared is statistically insignificant. Thus, in this model we couldn?t find evidence about EKC.In country-specific graphs, for Hungary, Poland, Romania and South Africa, per-capita CO2 emission are in a decreasing trend. In the midst of 1980s in Hungary, Poland and Romania the trend turned to decrease. For Algeria, Kuwait, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Venezuela, the increasing trend slowed down in the midst of 1980s and until today the trend seems to be steady.As we predicted, in every developing country, the per-capita GDPs have increasing trend..Only for Hungary, Poland, South Africa and Venezuela there seems to be EKC-likely trends. The other countries seem to be at the Pre-Industry stage.The regression results of the 4th model for Turkey show that, although the signs of the coefficients are perfectly fit for the EKC assumptions, per-capita GDP-squared is not statistically significant. When we include the per-capita GDP-cubed into the model, the only statistically significant variable per-capita GDP loses its significance.Both for the per-capita CO2 emission and the per-capita GDP, there are increasing trends over time. As we can see from the graph, Turkey still seems to be in the pre-Industrial period.The Fixed-Effects results examined for the worldwide pollution haven hypothesis are partly statistically significant. Exchange rate and FDI are the significant variables in the data set. In order to find evidence for the PHH, the variable CO2 was expected to be statistically significant. But, as we can see from the results, CO2 is not statistically significant.And finally, the regression results for Turkey examining the PHH show that, only CO2 and exchangerate are statistically significant. Thus, we can conclude that, there is some weak evidence of PHH with CO2 for Turkey. The significance of exchangerate seems quite plausible, since not only the pollution-intensive industries but also every industry may be affected by exchange rate trends.