The Environmental Philips Curve from a gender perspective: empirical evidence from India

The trade-off between environmental degradation and unemployment has been recently termed as Environmental Philips Curve (EPC). This research attempts to investigate the presence of EPC in the Indian context utilizing time series data for the period 1990–2019. Besides contributing to the meagre empirical literature on this issue, the present study makes a novel contribution by introducing a gender dimension to this investigation. In particular, this study investigates whether the nexus between environmental degradation and unemployment is different for men and women. We examine the presence of the EPC by estimating a model that considers growth in CO(2) emission as a function of economic growth, trade openness, and gender segregated unemployment rates. Our findings based on autoregressive distributed lag, fully modified ordinary least squares, and dynamic ordinary least squares estimators generate robust evidence for a negative impact of male unemployment rate on growth in CO(2) emission that validates the existence of the Environmental Philips Curve for the male unemployment rate. However, there is no trade-off between environmental quality and women’s employment. In fact, the results point to a favourable effect of reduction in female unemployment on environmental quality. The results of the Block Exogeneity test indicate a unidirectional causality from male unemployment rate to environmental degradation. However, a bidirectional causal relationship exists between female unemployment and environmental degradation. The existence of a trade-off between environmental quality and male employment suggests that India is yet to find viable technologies that can curtail pollution without compromising its livelihood. An optimistic conclusion emanating from our findings is the existence of a virtuous cycle between female employment and environmental quality. An integrated approach to improve environmental quality and increase women’s economic activity may facilitate a speedy realization of sustainable development goals for India as both the goals complement and reinforce each other.