Moving To Greener Pastures: Untangling The Evidence About Fdi And Environmental Regulation In Eu Countries

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between FDI and environmental regulation. A panel data set of 18 European countries has been used for a time period of 1995 to 2013. The dependent variable is FDI and the independent variables are total environmental tax revenue, gross domestic product, gross capital formation, gross national income, trade openness and carbon dioxide emissions.Used time series data (1995-2013) for empirical analysis. The empirical result is that total environmental tax revenue are positively related with FDI. Trade openness is coherent with FDI which is in line with Demirhan et al. (2008) and Edwards (1990). Gross domestic product and FDI are positively significant and the findings are reliable to the study of Mottaleb et al. (2008) and Hakizimana (2015). Gross capital formation and FDI has a positive relationship which is line with Krkoska (2001) and Awan et al. (2014). Gross national income and FDI has a negative relationship which is reliable to the study of Antwi et al. (2013) but unreliable to Awan et al. (2014). Nevertheless only carbon dioxide emissions has failed to be in line with the expected outcome. This empirical study implies increase in FDI will lead to an increase of total environmental tax revenue that may help the government to control the environment quality of their country by monitoring FDI inflows and a decrease in FDI inflow results in a less polluting environment. Further FDI revenue can boost up economic growth but that will be at the expense of the environment where government should come up with proper contract with the foreign investors in which it must be stated that use of green technology to decrease carbon dioxide emission and use of more environmentally friendly means of transport so that pollution in these countries could be alleviated. Governments should also motivate FDI to adopt lower levels of pollution by providing of subsidies, grants for the acquisition of environmentally friendly products and adopting production schemas which have a low impact on the environment.