This paper tests the pollution emissions and institutional quality nexus in Africa. Specifically, we analyze the effect of the political regime and the quality of political governance on CO2 emissions. To control for endogeneity, we apply the system generalized method of moments on a dynamic panel of African countries over the period 1996–2020. The key finding suggests that better institutions have a negative and significant effect on pollution in Africa. The findings also validate the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. Moreover, the results support the pollution haven hypothesis. Finally, if digitalization significantly curbs pollution, then industrialization, natural resources, as well as the intensive use of energy, are considered as positive predictors. All the sensitivity and robustness tests globally validate the strength of the negative association between the good quality of institutions and the level of polluting emissions in Africa. The results call for some policy recommendations in environmental regulation for African economies.

Empirical studies on the trade-environment nexus that use panel data face two simultaneous challenges. One is associated with the potential presence of unobserved cross-country heterogeneity, while the other is due to the use of aggregate data. In this paper, we apply both the dynamic fixed effects and iterative empirical Bayes estimators to show first that when country heterogeneity is accurately accounted for in the estimation, it is possible to obtain significant impacts of trade variables on the environment, even though we use aggregate data. Second, using both the empirical Bayes parameter estimates and indicators of stringency of environmental regulations, we show that at low levels of stringency, the probability of having pollution-intensive foreign direct investments (FDIs) increases with a decrease in stringency. However, at high levels of regulatory stringency, more stringent regulations may lead to more pollution-intensive FDIs. This implies that pollution havens may exist only if environmental regulations are very lax or nonexistent.

In recent decades, urban encroachment and increasing environmental regulation have impacted California's dairy industry. A complicated set of environmental legislation affects dairies in the state, and can differ depending on location, creating the possibility for within-state pollution havens. This article details the regional, state, and federal environmental regulation of California's dairy industry, and examines data to see if it matches a hypothesis of regulation affecting dairy location. Using county-year data, we show evidence of changing dairy location within the state matching times of local legislative action. The Central Valley gained production, while the more regulated and urban-affected Los Angeles area lost. Large dairies have increased by 150 percent in the Central Valley, even as the number of small farms in the region declined by 40 percent. More rigorous analysis is necessary to discern the relative impacts of land prices and regulation on dairy location.