Fossil fuel, industrial growth and inward FDI impact on CO2 emissions in Vietnam: testing the EKC hypothesis

Purpose In this paper, the authors investigate that the increasing level of fossil fuel combustion in the industrial sector has been considered the prime cause for the emissions of greenhouse gas. Meanwhile, the research focusing on the impact of fossil fuel consumption on the emission of CO2 is limited for the developing countries containing Vietnam. This study applied the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach with structural breaks presence, and the Bayer-Hanck combined cointegration method to observe the rationality of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis in the dynamic relationship between the industrialization and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission in Vietnam, capturing the role of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows and the fossil fuel consumption over the period of 1975-2019. The outcomes revealed the confirmation of cointegration among the variables and both short and long-run regression parameters indicated the evidence for the presence of a U-shaped association between the level of industrial growth and CO2 emission that is further confirmed by employing the Lind and Mehlum U-test for robustness purpose. The results of Granger causality discovered a unidirectional causality from FDI and fossil fuel consumption to CO2 emission in the short run. For the policy points, this study suggests the use of efficient and low carbon-emitting technologies. Design/methodology/approach In order to test for consistency and robustness of the cointegration analysis, this study also applied the ARDL bound testing method to find out long-run association among variables with the existence of the structural break in the dataset. The ARDL method was preferred to other traditional cointegration models; because of the smaller dataset, the results obtained from the ARDL method are efficient and consistent and equally appropriate for I(1) and I(0) variables. Findings The short-run and long-run causal associations among variables have been observed by employing the error correction term (ECT) augmented Granger-causality test that revealed the presence of the long-run causality among variables only when the CO2 emission is employed as a dependent variable. The outcomes for short-run causality indicated the presence of unidirectional causality between consumption of fossil fuel and CO2 emission, where the fossil fuel consumptions Granger-cause CO2 emission. Industrial growth has also been found to have an impact on fossil fuel consumptions, however not the opposite. This advocates that the policies aimed at reducing the fossil fuel consumptions would not be harmful to industrial growth as other energy efficient and cleaner technology could be implemented by the firms to substitute the fossil fuel usage. Originality/value The study explored the dynamic relationship among FDI, consumption of fossil fuel, industrial growth and the CO2 emission in Vietnam for the time period 1975-2019. The newly established Bayer-Hanck joint cointegration method and the ARDL bound testing were employed by taking into account the structural breaks in the dataset.