Foreign direct investment and air pollution in Asian countries: does institutional quality matter?

This paper empirically studies how foreign direct investment (FDI) affects air pollution, and how this effect depends on institutional quality. By using a panel data for 19 developing Asian countries over the period of 2002–2015, we find that FDI inflows initially increase air pollution in Asia, and the institutional quality improvement helps reduce this effect until the institutional quality achieves a threshold, then beyond this threshold, FDI reduces air pollution. The findings indicate that the pollution haven hypothesis and the pollution halo hypothesis are not contradictory when the institutional quality is taken into consideration.