The Environmental Impacts of Human Capital in the BRICS Economies

The prospects for new, decent jobs are large considering the transformation to a green economy. This article examines the environmental effects of human capital in the BRICS countries—Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa—over the period 1990–2017. Environmental quality (deploying carbon emissions as the proxy) and environmental sustainability (utilising adjusted net savings, excluding particulate emission damage as the indicator) are identified as the dependent variables. This paper uses more recently developed econometric models, namely the Cross-sectionally Augmented Distributed Lag (CS-ARDL) method and the Dumitrescu-Hurlin causality technique to analyse the data. The findings demonstrate that human capital is significantly positively related to both environmental quality and environmental sustainability in both the short and long run. Human capital also forms a bi-directional causality relationship with environmental sustainability, and environmental quality also causes human capital (thereby showing a uni-directional causality). As such, the paper suggests that governments should develop a policy which promotes investments in greening human skills.