Environmental sustainability targets: the role of green investment, ICT development, and economic growth

Current research investigates the role of green investment, information, and communication technology development growth in the Chinese economy’s carbon emissions from 1985-2015. This study has applied the quantile autoregressive distributed lagged (QARDL) approach and the Granger-causality in the quantiles to examine the causal linkage between the variables of interest. The findings through QARDL estimation confirm that there is an existence of significant reversion to the long-run equilibrium association between the explanatory variables and CO2. More specifically, the outcomes under long-run estimation confirm that GIN and ICT development plays a significant role in combating the issues like higher CO2 in China. At the same time, more economic growth leads to the destruction of the natural environment with higher carbon emissions. However, the square of economic growth shows some fruitful results towards fighting environmental pollution but not in all the quantiles of the study. Besides, the Granger-causality outcomes confirm the presence of a bi-directional association between green investment, ICT development, economic growth, and its square value. Based on the study findings, some policy implications are also provided. Besides, various limitations are also linked with this study. Firstly, the current study only examines the trends in CO2 emission from the context of China, whereas other regional economies are entirely neglected. Secondly, the factors like governmental influence in controlling carbon emission, environmental regulations, and governance mechanisms are entirely neglected in this research. Thirdly, the robust checking of the empirical findings is also missing in this study. Fourthly, economic uncertainty would also contribute to environmental pollution like CO2. Therefore, it is suggested that future studies should focus on these limitations to provide some meaningful suggestions and literature contributions.