Revisiting the Environmental Impactsof Railway Transport: Does EKC Existin South-Eastern Europe?

This study explores passenger railway transport to enrich the research on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis for a group of ten Southeastern Europe (SEE) countries, based on annual data for the period 1995 to 2014. The research results suggest that there exists a long-term, stable linkage among the observed variables. The legitimacy of the transport-induced EKC hypothesis is affirmed in the long-term in the SEE countries using the panel autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) of the pooled mean group (PMG) and fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS). Additionally, the evidence highlights the presence of the transport-induced EKC hypothesis only in the case of Croatia and Turkey in the short-term. Furthermore, it was detected that affluence, fossil fuel energy consumption, railway transport and urbanization drive environmental damage. The findings further suggest two-way causal relationship between transport activity and environmental depletion. Herein, the railway transportation system of the SEE countries does not help to reduce the level of carbon emissions.