Nature and economic growth in Turkey: what does ecological footprint imply?

Abstract

This study investigates the income–environment relationship in Turkey by examining the components of the ecological footprint indicator within the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) framework. Using co-integration techniques for the 1961–2008 period, we find an inverted U-shaped, hence EKC-type, relationship only between production footprint and income. Consumption, import and export footprints are found to be monotonically increasing with income, which suggests that Turkey tends to export the negative consequences of its consumption by importing rather than producing domestically the environmentally harmful products. We also find that imported footprint is not enough to cover the biocapacity deficit in Turkey, which results in a continuous decline in domestic biocapacity.

Keywords:

• ecological footprint
• economic growth
• biocapacity deficit
• co-integration

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sevil Acar http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5535-8673

Notes

1. See Singh, Murty, Gupta, and Dikshit (2012) for a survey of different sustainability indicators and methodologies.

2. An increase in the volume of production (scale) increases the pressure on nature. On the other hand, the shift in the composition of sectors towards less polluting activities, be it due to increased awareness of people and/or tightened environmental regulations, is expected to improve environmental quality. Finally, increases in efficiency due to technological innovations may help to reduce the pressure on nature.

3. See Table 1 to see how ecological footprint of consumption in Turkey in 2008 is broken down across land types and economic activities.

4. The turning point for income per capita after which environmental quality improves, is equal to .

5. Test results can be provided upon request from the authors.

6. As can be seen from Figure 2(a–d), there are dramatic falls in per capita income following the economic crisis in 1978, 1994 and 2001. In the cointegration relationships, we employ three ‘crisis year’ dummies as exogenous (unconstrained) variables.

7. Given the function y = ax2 + bx + c, the local maxima (or minima), hence the turning point is given by (−b/2a).

8. Note that GDP per capita ranges from 424 TL in 1961 to 1437 TL in 2008.