Environmental Protection and Environmental Protection Expenditure in Developing Countries: A Case of Turkey

Introduction

Some changes occur among the environment and social structures due to the human development, while it is planned to maintain the social welfare level appropriate to the level of economic development in developed countries; In developing countries, economic development often takes precedence over social welfare. On the other hand, environmental degradation and pollution are among the most harmful effects of human activities resulting from economic development. Today, global climate change and global warming problems emerge as an important problem affecting all countries. Although global climate change is a natural phenomenon, scientists seem to suggest that human activities increase global warming (Yıldırım et al., 2016; Yıldırım and Yıldırım, 2020; Yildirim, 2020; Esen et al., 2021; Yildirim et al., 2022; Yıldırım and Kantarcı 2022; Bostancı, 2022, Yildirim 2023).

Although Sustainable Development was introduced to the world for the first time with the report of the United Nations in 1987, it can be said that the policies and developments on sustainability became operational with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals adopted in 2015. Within the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, 17 basic goals that countries should achieve or reach by 2030 have been determined. These targets include the main topics that foresee a sustainable development between economic, social and environmental regulations. These can be summarized as poverty, hunger, equality, education, health, sustainable production and consumption and biodiversity (Bostancı and Yıldırım, 2021; Yildirim, 2020).

Protecting the quality of the environment is accepted as one of the priority targets of the countries. As a requirement of sustainable development, while the economic growth of each country continues, policies for the protection of environmental quality and the improvement of the environment are among the priority strategies (Gorgonea and Zaharia, 2020). Faced with the challenges of increasing environmental pollution and remediation, governments have various tools to reduce environmental pollution (Le Gallo and Ndiaye, 2017). In this context, environmental protection policies and environmental protection expenditures are important tools for government policies when improving environmental quality in the long term. The literature provides many studies that investigating the significant link between economic growth and environmental protection and environmental protection expenditures in the last decades. It can be said that most of them proved that environmental protection expenditures became an important variable when determining economic growth and environmental protection in a country (Ladaru and Dracea, 2017).