Education, methane emission and poverty in developing countries

ABSTRACT

In developing world, poor people are forced to overuse environmental resources to survive daily, and their impoverishment of the environment is expected to further impoverish them. With poverty and environmental degradation are the primary attribute of most developing countries, this study aims to show the implication of education on poverty-environmental issue in developing countries using panel data of 22 developing countries for the period of 1990–2016. Adopting autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach, the paper finds evidence substantiating the presence of emission which discharged from poverty. There is also evidence to indicate that the positive impact of poverty can be reduced if education has attained a certain high threshold level. The marginal effect displays that the impact of poverty on environmental degradation depends on education, with improvement in education helps to minimize the destruction potentially offered by the poor. Hence, policy focuses on improving various aspects of education, especially those relevant to combat poverty, can mitigate the adverse effect of poverty on emission.

KEYWORDS:

• Methane emission
• poverty
• education
• developing countries
• ARDL

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Extreme poor refers to those living on less than U.S.$1.90 a day.

2 Informally, it can be realized via students’ off-campus activities and so on. We believe that these informal activities could serve more effectively on the targeted population of poor or less educated society.

3 Nevertheless, what matter the most is the content of education syllabus. If the content is absent from ethical values and preserving environment, education per se may not be helpful at all.

4 Direct effect of education on environment could be also expected but in this study, we believe that as long as the primary source of environmental degradation, in which poor people is not targeted and solved, this problem will persist.

5 Among the possible explanation to insignificant role of income on environment could be the present of corruption (Masron and Subramaniam 2018).

6 Due to limited no of explanatory variables can be included, this study assumes the issues of urbanization (e.g. Li et al. 2012) and industrialization (e.g. D’Souza, and Peretiatko 2002; Cherniwchan 2012) are embedded in income variable.

7 This could justify our statement in footnote #3 that missing crucial content of education relevant to environmental preservation as well as ethical values may be the explanation behind the insignificant results. Nevertheless, these points can only be confirmed via survey type of research as no relevant data is currently available at macro level.

8 We do not include GDP² as predicted by EKC model because of two reasons. First, we concur with Begum et al. (2015) that EKC does not really hold and Masron and Subramaniam (2018) that in the presence of corruption, high income will never help to protect the environment. Second, even if we want to assume that EKC is valid, developing countries’ income levels are generally not too high to allow for negative GDP²-pollution relationship. Thirdly, to allow for more degree of freedom to improve the validity of the results.