Institutional determinants of environmental pollution in Russia: a non-linear ARDL approach

This paper aims to examine how institutional factors affect carbon dioxide emission in case of Russia with an emphasis on the asymmetrical effects of corruption. Institutional factors include corruption perception in the sampled economy and income inequality. The study deploys a non-linear autoregressive distributed-lagged approach to the hypothesis testing. Using the data for the period 1996-2018 of the sampled factors, affecting carbon dioxide emission in Russia, we aim to find the existence of the cointegration between the variables and determine the existence of the asymmetrical effects. In the results of the empirical investigation it was found that carbon dioxide emissions, corruption and income inequality in Russia are cointegrated. In both the long and short run, positive shocks in corruption increase environmental degradation in Russia. A 1% increase in corruption leads to a 0.13% and 0.17% rise in CO2 emission in the short and long run respectively under 5% significance level. Income inequality is found to be a statistically insignificant determinant of carbon dioxide emission in Russia.