A Trade-off Between Economic Growth and Environment Sustainability

摘要

Climate change has been a troubling environmental issue for years. Environmental, which includes climate change, has been ranked top five global risk of 2017 in a recent report by World Economic Forum (WEF 2017). The incentive to resolve or reduce the deterioration process has been set out by many countries across the world. Environmentally speaking, reducing emissions plays a crucial role in slowing the deterioration process which in turn, improves the environment condition. However, by reducing emission and other means can negatively impact the economy in terms of production and output. Thus, this can limit countries’ economic growth especially for emerging markets. To further understand the impacts, this paper seeks to answer the research question: how does fulfilling the Paris Agreement inversely impact emerging market’s economic growth especially for top emission emitters in Asia? To answer the question, this paper would examine relation between emissions and economic growth in quantitative term. In addition to quantitative analysis, case studies of specific emerging market countries would be included as well.