Abstract
Military spending is required for national sovereignty, but it comes at a cost. The ecological consequences of military activities remain insufficiently investigated, especially in developing countries, where military spending is on the rise due to terrorism and civil unrest created by different secessionists’ groups. As such, this study has a maiden attempt to address this gap by exploring the effects of military spending on the ecological footprint (EF) using the bootstrap causality test and the Maki (2012) cointegration test under multiple structural breaks. The findings suggest that military spending increases the EF. Also, while energy consumption and economic growth degrade the environment, financial development enhances environmental wellbeing by reducing the ecological footprint. The causality results suggest a unidirectional causality from military spending to EF, while feedback causality exists between military spending and economic growth. The result of this study affirms the existence of destruction theory and also provides a better understanding of the links behind environmental degradation and is applicable for the design and implementation of environmental policies.
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The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
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Available on reasonable request.
Change history
14 July 2022
Institution name correction for affiliation 2 and 3.
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The authors appreciate the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments that substantially improved this manuscript.
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This research is fully funded by the University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The approved funding number is IBR_RF263.
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PBE wrote literature, discussed the results, and supervised the study. XVV wrote literature and provided the relevant policy directions. SPN conceived the idea, wrote the introduction as well as the methodology, and performed data analysis.
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Eregha, P.B., Vo, X.V. & Nathaniel, S.P. Military spending, financial development, and ecological footprint in a developing country: insights from bootstrap causality and Maki cointegration. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 83945–83955 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-21728-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-022-21728-3