Zebo Tukhtaeva

Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
The environmental consequences of trade liberalization remain a critical concern for developing countries pursuing World Trade Organization (WTO) membership. Uzbekistan’s recent economic reforms and accelerated integration into global markets necessitate an empirical assessment of how trade openness and economic growth interact with carbon emissions. This study aims to examine the long-run and short-run relationships between real GDP, trade openness, and per capita CO₂ emissions in Uzbekistan. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach is applied to annual time series data from 1997 to 2024. The Augmented Dickey–Fuller test confirms that all variables are integrated of order I(1), and the ARDL(1,4,0) model is selected based on the Akaike Information Criterion. The bounds test F-statistic (4.607) exceeds the upper critical value at the 5% significance level, confirming long-run cointegration. The estimated long-run elasticities suggest that a 1% increase in GDP is associated with a 0.196% decrease in CO₂ emissions while a 1% increase in trade openness corresponds to a 0.185% reduction in emissions. These findings support the pollution halo hypothesis. The error correction coefficient of −0.94 indicates a rapid adjustment toward equilibrium. Validated by robust diagnostic tests, the results provide empirical evidence that Uzbekistan’s trade integration is compatible with environmental sustainability, offering policy guidance for aligning WTO accession strategies with green development objectives.