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The use of environmental protection policies has developed considerably over the last two decades and has generated a prolific literature. This study examines the impact of environmental policies on environmental quality for a panel of 36 OECD countries over the period from 1994 to 2018. To do this, we use matching and double‐difference methods. This enabled us to find a causal link between the environmental tax and CO2 emissions in the manufacturing and transport sectors. Furthermore, by estimating our model using fixed effects techniques, Driscoll and Kraay, Lewbel 2SLS and Quantiles, we obtained the result demonstrating that the environmental tax contributes to reducing CO2 emissions from the transport and manufacturing sectors. On the basis of these results, we suggest that taxes should be strengthened quantitatively and qualitatively in order to better target sectors known to be highly polluting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this work was to analyse the effects of environmental quality and environmental regulations on the exports of sub‐Saharan African countries. Adopting the pollution haven hypothesis as a theoretical framework, we use a gravity model enriched by environmental variables. Our main results indicate that it is the environmental quality of sub‐Saharan African (SSA) countries, as measured by the Environmental Performance Index, and the differences in environmental quality between a country and its partner that constitute a barrier to SSA exports. It therefore appears important for SSA countries to integrate the environmental factor into their policies to improve the competitiveness of their exports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper empirically examines how the size of the shadow economy affects environmental quality in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). We apply the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) methodology to a panel of 22 SSA countries over the 1991–2015 period. Findings show that there is a negative relationship between the size of the shadow economy (in percentage of GDP) and CO2 emission both in the long and short run. Also, the size of shadow economy is found to be inversely related to CO2 emission in the long run for all income groups, but this effect is statistically significant only within the subpanel of lower-middle-income countries. Consistent with the scale effect, our findings suggest that there is no evidence that the shadow economy increases environmental degradation in SSA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]