Foreign direct investment and manufacturing CO₂ emissions in ASEAN

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Type of the article: Research Article

Abstract
This study examines how foreign direct investment (FDI) has affected manufacturing carbon emissions in eight ASEAN economies from 2005 to 2022 using panel data from the World Bank and UNCTAD and employing random effects and feasible generalized least squares estimators. The preferred specification indicates that a 1 percentage point increase in manufacturing-adjusted FDI inflows (as a share of GDP) is associated with a 0.018-unit rise in log manufacturing CO₂ emissions (approximately 1.8%). Simultaneously, population size (coefficient ≈ 0.94) and fossil fuel energy consumption (coefficient ≈ 0.053) exert strong positive and statistically significant effects. By contrast, per capita income and its squared term are not significant, providing no support for a Kuznets type nonlinear income-emissions relationship, and lagged emissions add little once contemporaneous drivers and error structures are controlled for. The results suggest that FDI has primarily flowed into emissions-intensive manufacturing activities, with limited evidence of broad-based clean technology transfer, thereby risking a lock-in of carbon-intensive development that undermines ASEAN’s Net Zero ambitions and intergenerational equity. The paper argues that tighter environmental standards for FDI, an accelerated energy transition away from fossil fuels, and integrated population planning is needed to reconcile manufacturing-led industrial expansion with sustainability goals in ASEAN. It also offers sector specific evidence to guide FDI governance and energy policy in middle-income countries.

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    • Table 1. Descriptive statistics
    • Table 2. Correlation matrix
    • Table 3. Pooled OLS model regression results
    • Table 4. Regression results of FEM and REM models
    • Table 5. Hausman test results
    • Table 6. REM model defect inspection results
    • Table 7. Model estimation results according to FGLS
    • Table A1. Pesaran’s CD test results
    • Table A2. Pesaran panel unit root test results
    • Table A3. Westerlund test results
    • Table A4. Multicollinearity test results
    • Table A5. Pooled OLS model defect testing results
    • Conceptualization
      Quoc Tran-Nam
    • Formal Analysis
      Quoc Tran-Nam
    • Funding acquisition
      Quoc Tran-Nam
    • Methodology
      Quoc Tran-Nam, Nhi Tran
    • Project administration
      Quoc Tran-Nam
    • Supervision
      Quoc Tran-Nam
    • Writing – review & editing
      Quoc Tran-Nam
    • Data curation
      Nhi Tran
    • Investigation
      Nhi Tran
    • Resources
      Nhi Tran
    • Software
      Nhi Tran
    • Validation
      Nhi Tran
    • Visualization
      Nhi Tran
    • Writing – original draft
      Nhi Tran