Heterogeneous effect of oil production on environmental degradation: panel evidence from OPEC member countries

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to look at the asymmetric effect of oil production on environmental degradation in OPEC member countries from 1970-2019. Design/methodology/approach The authors build a nonlinear panel ARDL-PMG model using the Shin et al. (2014) nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach in panel form to assess both the short- and long-run impact of positive and negative oil production movements on CO2 emissions. Findings The result demonstrates that the variables are cointegrated. According to the linear long run coefficients, oil production, FDI inflows and economic growth both have a positive and significant relationship with CO2 emissions, implying that they deteriorate environmental quality in OPEC countries, while renewable energy has a negative relationship with CO2, implying that increasing renewable energy improves environmental quality. The asymmetric findings prove that positive and negative shocks of oil production exert a positive effect on carbon emissions in short run and long run. Research limitations/implications To begin with, the empirical assessments do not include all OPEC member nations; researchers are advised to resolve this constraint by looking at the economies of other OPEC members. Albeit the lack of data for other energy sources may serve as another constraint of this research, future research is expected to broaden the current framework via other energy sources such as nuclear, electricity, biomass, solar as well as wind. Originality/value The research adds to the body of knowledge as many of the prevailing studies in the literature failed to look at the asymmetric effect of oil production on the quality of environment. This is another gap in the literature that the current study is set out to fill. This study adds oil production as an explanatory variable and helps to extend the existing literature for OPEC countries, which could propose a solution to deal with ensuing environmental issues.