Economic Growth and Environmental Pollution in Brunei: ARDL Bounds Testing Approach to Cointegration

Aims: This study examined the short run and long run dynamic relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution in Brunei. We adoptedAuto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to scrutinize the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) among the studying variables by using time series data cover the period of 1974 to 2014.

Methodology: The ARDL bound test revealed the existence of long-run relationship among the integrated variables when CO2 chosen as a dependent variable.

Results: The results support the existences of EKC hypotheses in the long-run whereas in the short-run an inverted U-shaped curve was not confirmed between GDP and CO2 in Brunei. The results of Granger causality based on VECM analysis have shown unidirectional causality runs from economic growth to CO2 in the short run. Further analysis through stability test indicates the coefficients in the model are stable and do not suffers with structural break within the time taken in the study.

Conclusion: The government of Brunei should proceed to target the sustainable means of production, which has an environmental friendly and consumes less energy to enhance economic growth and maintain environmental quality in the long run.