The nexus between environmental regulation and ecological footprint in OECD countries: empirical evidence using panel quantile regression.

Environmental regulation is an important tool for policymakers to achieve environmental goals. To better understand the role of environmental regulation in protecting the ecosystem, this paper offers a new perspective on exploring the heterogeneous impact of environmental policy stringency on the ecological footprint in 27 OECD countries during the period 1990-2015. An advanced economic method, panel quantile regression, is conducted to deal with the non-normality and unobserved individual heterogeneity across countries. The estimation outcomes indicate that the environmental effect of policy stringency is heterogeneous along the quantiles and different between the ecological footprint of consumption and production. The beneficial role of environmental regulation in reducing consumption ecological footprint is achieved at quantiles under 80th but the harmful effect starts occurring at extreme high quantiles. In contrast, environmental policy stringency plays a consistently useful role in mitigating production ecological footprint. In addition, the results disclose that the effects of other driving factors such as international trade, energy efficiency, renewable energy, and income are heterogeneous at different quantiles of ecological footprint. These findings help explain the inconsistencies in previous empirical studies on the nexus between environmental regulation and environmental quality in OECD countries. Finally, the current study gives policymakers useful recommendations on how to strengthen the beneficial impacts of environmental policies on the ecosystem.