The effects of environmental tax on Ecological Footprint and Carbon dioxide emissions: a nonlinear cointegration analysis on Turkey

This article presents a nonlinear analysis in Turkey on the effect of an environmental tax (ET) on the ecological footprint (EFP) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. In the literature, most of the studies examining the effects of environmental taxes (ETs) on environmental degradation (ED) have used linear methods. The number of studies examining this relationship with nonlinear methods is few. However, there is no study examining the long-run effects of ETs on the EFP, which is one of the most important indicators of ED, using nonlinear analysis. This study contributes to the literature by investigating the long-run effects of ETs on EFP and CO2 emissions in Turkey by nonlinear analysis. Therefore, the model consisting of annual data for the period 1994–2019 was estimated by Dufrénot et al. (2006) nonlinear cointegration test. According to the estimation results obtained, ETs do not have any long-run effects on EFP and CO2 emissions. Accordingly, it can be concluded that ETs in Turkey do not affect preventing ED.