Growth and Environment: The Asian Perspective

Introduction

The world nowadays is much more aware of the anthropocentric environmental degradation that is happening from hundreds of years, mostly following the industrial revolution in Great Britain and then the United States of America. It has been estimated that the CO₂ concentration in the air increased thrice following the industrial revolution (Banerjee et al., 2022a). These hundreds of years of anthropocentric atrocities giving less to least importance to the environment have now brought the environment to a chock point with an ample carbon footprint. Considering the pro-environment production process there has always been discontent among the developed and developing along with less developed nations. The developing and less developed nations have been repeatedly alarmed by the international bodies lobbied by the developed nations to curtail CO₂ emissions through costly technological change that will replace their labour intensive choice of technique to capital intensive choice of technique. At times they were advised to follow the developed nation’s growth paradigm and assured after a certain time gap they will be at the right slope of the Environmental Kuznets Curve. This particular chapter is investigative in nature; it excavates the relationship between the environment and economic growth for the continent of Asia through empirical analysis.

Among all the continents, the Asian continent is the largest. Moreover, the Asian continent is the largest cluster of developing and less developed countries. These countries need growth and development to unshackle them from the low-level equilibrium trap and experience a better level of human development, gender parity and improvement in other globally accepted growth and development indicators. Towards this end, these countries need to experience a high level of economic growth and development that will provide them the escape velocity from this low-level equilibrium trap. Further, the countries of the mentioned continent are considered either as a potential market or manufacturing hub by the Multi-National Firms of the developed world. This opens up limitless opportunities for the countries of the Asian continent but also opens up Pandora’s box of environmental hazards (Sumner, 2015).

The countries of the Asian continents especially two of the Asian superpowers India and China have been historically criticized for higher emissions of Carbon-di-Oxide gas that is detrimental to the environment and ended up on the wrong side of the environmental Kuznets Curve. It is worth mentioning that any kind of environmental pollution might be local in origin but global in impact. This leaves us in a mutually conflicting scenario, where on one side economic growth and on the other side pro-environment attitude have to be simultaneously ensured. They have to go in tandem to achieve a Pareto optimal position. The question that hovers around is whether these mutually conflicting approaches can ever coincide. Globally green investment, green finance and green accounting have become highly popular over the last decade and so as sustainable corporate social responsibility. These are expected to develop a pro-environment economic growth and development paradigm that will eventually nourish our future generations and would be abide by the principle benefitting the present without hurting the future (Wu et al., 2015).

In this regard, it is worth mentioning that pro environmental economic growth and development paradigm has been developed following the Stockholm convention of 1972 and received more impetus after the establishment of the Brundtland Commission in 1983 following its dissolve in 1987 after their epic report Our Common Future. Regardless of academic criticism, such as ordinal nature and replication of Pigou's externality, the report remains a landmark because it introduces sustainable development to academic literature and policymakers for the first time. It has also been observed that the growth of per capita CO₂ emissions has significantly decreased from the pre-Brundtland Commission report to the post-Brundtland Commission report (Banerjee et al., 2022a).