The Role of Foreign Direct Investment and Trade on Environmental Quality in Vietnam

The study of environmental pollution plays an important role in controlling emissions in the production activities of FDI enterprises as well as export goods. Vietnam is a country with a large proportion of FDI contribution and high export value. Therefore, there should be studies to assess the actual effects of FDI and the openness of the economy (trade) on the environment. Therefore, the authors conduct research on the role of FDI and trade on environmental quality in Vietnam. With data collected from 1990 to 2018 (from the period of Vietnam's economy opening up) through the ARDL (Autoregressive Distributed Lag) model, the results show that FDI has a positive impact on CO2 emissions in the short term but has no impact on the long-term (In this study, CO2 is considered to represent environmental quality). The trade has a positive impact on CO2 emissions in both the short term and long term. The results of the study show the actual shortcomings of FDI as well as production activities in the export enterprises in Vietnam. From the results of this research, the author also provides the causes and remedies to control of CO2 emissions from two activities of foreign direct investment and trade.