An International Refereed Management Journal of FMS, Gurukul Kangri (Deemed to be University), Haridwar
Liaqat Ali Waseem, Ashfak Ahmad Khan, Muneeb Ahmad
This study has investigated that how corruption and human capital can affect environmental pollution in Bangladesh in terms of CO2 emission and PM2.5 as environmental indicators. The Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) and Nonlinear ARDL (NARDL) are used to analyze annual data from 2001-2023 in order to test symmetric and asymmetric effects. The results reveal that there is a long-run Cointegration relationship between corruption, human capital, economic growth, energy consumption, and environmental pollution. The presence of corruption heavily leads to the environment pollution and human capital decreases the amount of CO2 emission both in short- and long-run. With asymmetric analysis results reveal that the positive shocks to corruption are stronger in their effects of increasing environmental pollution than the negative ones decrease environmental pollution, and the results validate the hypothesis of Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) in Bangladesh. Policy implications suggestion includes institutional empowering, anti-corruption implementation, and investment in education as a way of enhancing the environment sustainability.