Flying Towards Pollution? The Environmental Impacts of Air Cargo, Economic Growth and PM 2.5 Emissions in Emerging Asia

Environmental sustainability is a central concern in rapidly developing regions. This article investigates dynamic interactions among PM 2.5 , economic growth, trade, international tourism expenditures and air cargo transport for emerging Asian economies over the period 1990–2023. Using panel data methods with variance decomposition, we show that PM 2.5 is predominantly self-driven in the short run but increasingly shaped by external macroeconomic and sectoral forces over time. Air cargo transport has emerged as the most influential external source of variation in PM 2.5 . International tourism expenditures contribute to additional variations in PM 2.5 , suggesting that tourism-related mobility and consumption can influence air-quality dynamics through indirect channels. GDP shocks are associated with higher PM 2.5 , while the non-linear income dynamics captured by GDP and its squared term are broadly consistent with an environmental Kuznets curve–type relationship in the impulse–response patterns. Air cargo transport exhibits a nuanced effect: it is associated with short-run reductions in PM 2.5 in the estimated dynamics, while its overall influence remains substantial in explaining longer-horizon fluctuations. Overall, the results indicate strong internal persistence in PM 2.5 , alongside an increasingly important role for transport-related shocks over longer horizons, motivating cleaner production and sustainable logistics policies.