Is Environmental Kuznets Hypothesis Vice-Versa for Bangladesh Especially in the Times of Global Climate Change? – An ARDL Econometric Modeling Approach

The relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation has been one of the most studied topics especially in developing countries around the world. This paper intends to investigate whether the Environmental Kuznets Hypothesis holds for Bangladesh when the country is experiencing a phenomenal rate of economic growth amidst global climate challenges. By exploiting the data from 1981 to 2019 for Bangladesh, a developing country highly vulnerable to the threats posted by the recent global climate changes, the integration between CO2 emission and economic development has been explored and the validity of the Kuznets hypothesis has been checked through the lens of an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bound test process. The findings ascertain that there is a positive relationship between environmental degradation and economic growth of Bangladesh which represents a vice-versa trend in terms of Kuznets hypothesis. An increase in one kiloton of CO2 emission leads the growth of GDP by 0.016 per cent. Furthermore, the study also lists some of the policy approaches to help prepare Bangladesh to confront the impending consequences from climate changes and to promote environment friendly economic development.