Pages: 1-26

Abstract

Railway transportation is still considered a marker of economic growth,but rarely isthe cost of environmental damages taken into account. The purpose of this study is to investigate the “Railway Kuznet Curve” in context of three key pollutants:Carbon dioxide emissions, Nitrous oxide emissions and Methane emissions, for 37 High income nations during 1990 to 2017. The econometric results of Panel GMM shows that there existsa “U shape” Railway Kuznet curve for carbon dioxide and methane emissions, indicating increasing level of pollution;while nitrous oxide emissions exhibit the “inverted U shape curve”, validating the Railway Kuznet curve. The Pairwise DumitrescuHurlin Panel Causality shows a bidirectional relation of nitrous and methane emissions and unidirectional association of CO2 emissions to railway transportation. The diagnostic test of ARCH-effect and serial correlation shows homoscedasticity and no autocorrelation along with CUSUM test that shows stability of all the three models. Our econometric analysis suggests that developed nations should focus on exploiting renewable energy resources while adopting fuel-saving traveler and freight technologies, including hybrid switch trains and hydrogen-powered steam engines,in order to cut diesel consumption. Significance/novelty of the Study: This analysis has developed a novel contribution in literature by rational analysis for existence of Railways Transportation Kuznet curve hypotheses in the perspective of carbon, methane and nitrous oxide. Hence a wide-range analysis was carried out at panel data incorporating other key influential variables affecting environment such as trade, economic growth, population, energy consumption and FDI, which hadnot been carried out in previous studies. All the previous studies were carried out either on few countries or for selective years considering certain variables only in the context of CO₂ but current study is conducted on panel data for three different prominent environment degrading indicators (CO₂, N₂O, and CH4) one by one‎.