Fresh insight through the VAR approach to investigate the effects of fiscal policy on environmental pollution in Pakistan

This study explores the impact of fiscal policy on environmental pollution, employing the vector autoregressive (VAR) model on annual data from 1976 to 2018 in Pakistan. We estimate the effect of total expenditure, total revenue, education expenditures, health expenditures, and other dynamic determinants such as gross domestic product (GDP), private investment, market rate, and crude oil price on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in particular. Further, this study creates impulse response functions to check the fiscal shocks, coordinating with five scenarios of public expenditures, segregated into government revenue, and education and health expenditures. The outcomes indicate that government spending in the public sectors (education and health) had a diminishing effect on CO2 emissions, whereas government revenue that was collected from taxes improved economic growth but at a cost of environmental pollution. In Pakistan, a fiscal policy scenario has been implemented that increases government expenditures to alleviate the effects of CO2 emissions. Therefore, policymakers should provide the right direction for the feasible distribution of resources in every public sector through a powerful structure, which will ultimately reduce the overall level of environmental deficit.

Automated summary

The study in Pakistan found that government spending in the education and health sectors can reduce CO2 emissions, while government revenue collected through taxes promotes economic growth but increases environmental pollution.