Environmental Quality Related Challenges for Emerging Economies – from Pollution Haven to Green Economic Growth

Abstract

Environmental issues are critical for national economies worldwide, and the mitigation of their adverse effects is a priority. There is a general agreement that economic activities, are responsible for endangering the environmental quality and for creating serious problems for natural habitats (Abban et al., 2023; Balsalobre-Lorente et al., 2023; Nuta et al., 2015a; Nuta et al., 2015b; Tiwari et al., 2023). However, the pollution that generated the climate change was possible due to the fact that between different regions existed deep development gaps and their evolution was different in terms of pace and opportunities. Thus, for recovering the gaps some of them depended on foreign financial resources (Ayad et al., 2023; Shahbaz et al., 2023; Zhang et al., 2023). To attract the needed investments, in many cases they used less strict environmental protection regulations as a competitive advantage. In other words, they became pollution havens, were less advanced technological production methods created economic output on the expense of deteriorating the ecological environment, excessive exploitation of raw natural resources, intensive energy consumption, and pollution. In this study, the focus is on discussing the challenges that emerging economies encounter for switching their development patterns to embrace green economic growth options.