Research of the impact of economic structure on environmental pollution with structural equation modeling

In social sciences, many variables can not be observed directly. Variables which can not be observed directly like emotion, attitude, success and measured via observed variables are called latent variables. Structural Equation Modeling which is the method of the study is a deductive multivariate statistical method that can estimate observed and latent variables in the same model. In this direction, traits and types of Structural Equation Modeling were handled detailed in this study. Environment-economy relationship is chosen as a social subject on which the method is applied. The purpose of the study is to estimate the effect of economic structure (industry and agriculture sectors) and national income on environmental quality indicators with structural equation modeling. As environmental quality indicators access to clean water and carbondioxide emission are chosen. The variables of 188 countries which are in human development ranking made up the data set of the study. The effect of industrialization and national income on environmental quality could not be detected. The environment polluting effect of agricultural sector is verified. Keywords: Environment pollution, emission, greenhouse gasses, structural equation modeling