Explore the vast range of titles available.

This study builds on the pollution haven and induced innovation arguments as explanations for firm behavior with regard to international environmental management and argues both need to be integrated. This implies that foreign direct investment is capable of facilitating a \"race to the bottom\" and a \"race to the top\" simultaneously. Using novel and detailed data, we test whether environmental capabilities and weaknesses and other characteristics affect US firms' foreign direct investment choices in Chinese provinces with more or less stringent environmental regulation. This enables a more detailed analysis by allowing country regulation to vary spatially and over time. Our study finds that heterogeneity in capabilities and firm size jointly determine foreign direct investment and in doing so shows the simultaneity of a race to the bottom and to the top. Specifically, firms with environmental capabilities invest in more stringently regulated regions and firms with weaknesses are less likely to target such regions. These diverging effects are both moderated by firm size, which further amplifies each of them. Our findings underscore the need to integrate pollution haven and induced innovation arguments in a joint analysis. They furthermore show the relevance of methodological choices when testing hypotheses integrating the above arguments empirically.

We re-examine the Pollution Haven and Pollution Halo hypotheses (PHEH and PHALH) using a quantile-based Bootstrap Fourier Granger causality test, a method adept at identifying non-linear structural breaks. Our study encompasses data from China and the G3 countries (Japan, the UK, and the USA) spanning the period from 1980 to 2020. Our empirical findings reveal that data from the USA corroborates the PHEH, suggesting a trend where increased foreign direct investment (FDI) aligns with higher environmental degradation. In contrast, data from China affirms the PHALH, indicating that FDI contributes to improved environmental standards. However, data from Japan and the UK do not conclusively support either hypothesis. These results have significant implications for governmental policy formulation in China and the G3 countries, particularly in shaping FDI policies that align with environmental sustainability goals.

In the context of the global sustainability agenda, firms are increasingly expected to incorporate environmental considerations into their global expansion strategies. However, existing studies mainly focus on formal institutions and economic factors, while the role of informal institutions remains underexplored. This study examines how Confucian cultural values influence Chinese firms’ outward foreign direct investment (OFDI), particularly their investment behavior in environmentally stringent host countries, such as Germany, Sweden, and Canada. Using panel data of Chinese A-share listed firms from 2009 to 2024, this study employs panel regression analysis to test the effects of cultural values, environmental pressure, and CEO power. The results show that cultural values are positively associated with both OFDI intensity and the likelihood of investing in environmentally stringent countries. In addition, environmental pressure strengthens this relationship, whereas CEO power weakens it. This study contributes to the literature on responsible global expansion by highlighting the role of informal institutions and firm-level characteristics. The findings also provide practical implications for policymakers and firms seeking to promote environmentally responsible international investment behavior.

In the past 40 years after China adopted the reform and open-up policy, China's expediting industries spatial agglomeration has resulted in severe damage to the environment. In China, the one whether the pollution haven hypothesis (PHH) is true or not is the hot issue under the research of academic circles. By establishing the mechanism model of industries spatial agglomeration and environmental pollution in this paper, we discovered upon our empirical study that China's industrial spatial agglomeration process had apparent threshold characteristics for environmental pollution, those direct investment and scientific innovation of foreign merchants apparently improved environmental pollution, so PHH is not true in China and such conclusion provides empirical support for China's industrial agglomeration and environmental policymaking. At the end of the paper, the policy proposals for improving environmental pollution in future are made, which have important significance for China's high-quality economic development.

This article offers a review and critique of the large literature on the pollution havens hypothesis. This hypothesis refers to the notion that certain jurisdictions can become pollution havens as dirty industries relocate or expand in response to differences in regulatory stringency. The early literature, based on cross-sectional analyses, typically concludes that environmental regulations have an insignificant effect on firm location decisions. However, recent studies that use panel data to control for unobserved heterogeneity, or instruments to control for endogeneity, find statistically significant pollution haven effects of reasonable magnitude. Furthermore, this distinction appears regardless of whether the studies look across countries, states, counties, or industries, or whether they examine plant locations, investment, or international trade patterns.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows from developed to developing countries may increase carbon emissions in developing countries as developing countries are seen as pollution havens due to their lenient environmental regulations. On the other hand, FDI flows from the developed world may improve management practices and advanced technologies in developing countries, and an increase in FDI flows reduces carbon emissions. Most of the existing studies examine the relationship between FDI flows and carbon emissions by using aggregate FDI flows; however, this paper contributes to the literature by analyzing the impact of FDI flows on carbon emissions in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS) between 1993 and 2012 using bilateral FDI flows from eleven OECD countries. According to our empirical results, from which OECD country FDI flows to BRICS countries matters for carbon emissions in BRICS countries. Our results confirm that FDI flows to BRICS countries from Denmark and the UK increase carbon emissions in BRICS countries, confirming the pollution haven hypothesis. On the other hand, FDI that flows from France, Germany, and Italy reduced carbon emissions in the BRICS countries, confirming the pollution halo effect. FDI flows from Austria, Finland, Japan, Netherlands, Portugal, and Switzerland have no significant impact on carbon emissions in BRICS countries. The BRICS countries should promote clean FDI flows by reducing environmental damages, and investing countries should be rated based on their environmental damage in the host countries.

In order to reduce environmental degradation, there has been an increased focus on identifying the main conftributors to environmental degradation and reducing carbon footprints to promote sustainable development. Although the recent focus on institutional and policy reforms has led to a higher focus on environmental discussion, little is known about the status of research on the Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH). Hence, the current study evaluates the research dynamics of this field by recognizing most central researchers and key publication outlets from the perspectives of most citations and productivity, research directions, common keywords, countries with the highest academic contribution, and changes in research matrices. Our selection of 494 journal articles from the WOS indicates that King Saud University and the University of Wah were the most productive research institutions, and China was the most productive geographical region. Environmental Science & Pollution Research was identified as the most common outlet for research publications. We also identified strong academic cooperation, notably between China and Pakistan. Moreover, the co-occurrence network identified the Pollution Haven Hypothesis and economic growth nexus, trade, pollution haven and developing economies and FDI, carbon emissions, and pollution haven nexus as the three main prevailing research themes. Lastly, we provide useful policy implications to maximize the impact of environmental reforms and avoid environmental degradation.

In this study, we analyzed the asymmetric short- and long-run causal links between foreign direct investments and emissions in Turkey over the time period 1974–2018. Using hidden co-integration techniques, we defined and tested the asymmetric pollution haven and asymmetric pollution halo hypotheses. To evaluate the long-run asymmetric causal relationship, we estimated both the crouching error correction model and vector error correction model. We performed a stepwise regression model to estimate the crouching error correction model. The empirical results confirmed an asymmetric causal relationship between positive shocks of foreign direct investments and positive movements in emissions in the short run as well as an asymmetric causal link between negative and positive shocks of foreign direct investments and positive emissions in the long run. Furthermore, the results showed that increases in foreign direct investments led to a decrease in the rate of emission growth in both the short and long run. This finding supports the validity of the asymmetric pollution halo hypothesis in Turkey’s case. Policymakers should strengthen their environmental protection laws to protect the quality of their environments as well as implement policies that encourage the use of clean technology and tax incentives that increase foreign direct investment inflows. Graphical Abstract

Stringent environmental regulations may encourage industrial innovation, as technological advancements lower the cost of pollution abatement (Popp et al. in Handbook of the economics of innovation, vol II. Academic Press, Burlington, pp 873–938, 2010 ). The pollution-havens hypothesis, on the other hand, indicates that, rather than innovating, dirty industries may relocate to countries with less stringent environmental regulations (Copeland and Taylor in J Econ Lit 42(1):7–71, 2004 ). Thus, more stringent environmental regulations may increase or decrease innovative activities. This paper examines empirically the impact of environmental regulations on R&D intensities and R&D expenditures in 21 manufacturing industries in 28 OECD countries from 2000 to 2007. I consider pollution intensity and the relative ease of relocation (immobility) as industry characteristics that determine the optimal industry response to increased environmental policy stringency. I find that more pollution intensive industries innovate less as regulatory environments become more restrictive relative to less pollution intensive industries. At the same time, more immobile industries innovate more than more mobile industries as environmental regulations become more stringent, illustrating innovation as an alternative to relocation.

The global energy system has a long way to go to meet international climate goals, and significant investment in renewable energy is required to accelerate the energy transition (IRENA, 2016, 2019). We examine how firm- and country-specific conditions in the electric utility sector impact foreign direct investment (FDI) in renewables. Using a unique dataset of 289 greenfield investments by 17 multinational energy utilities, we employ a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) that yields five causal configurations leading to FDI in renewables and four configurations leading to investment in non-renewables. Our results indicate that private MNEs are at the forefront of investment in renewables, and while state-owned MNEs (SOMNEs) do invest in them, they tend to follow strategies that are less risky compared to private MNEs and more responsive to host-country incentives. Our analysis suggests that for private MNEs, international experience is strongly associated with investment in renewables, while for SOMNEs it is associated with investment in non-renewables. Further, we also identify instances where MNEs contribute simultaneously to a ‘race to the top’ and a ‘race to the bottom’ by investing in both renewables and non-renewables in different markets, thereby reducing the pace of the energy transition.