Investigation of the N-shaped environmental Kuznets curve for COVID-19 mitigation in the KSA

Climate change mitigation has led to a recent question regarding many policymakers and sustainable development goals (SDGs) of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) for Vision 2030. In 2019 and 2020, COVID-19 mitigation was the only issue the world raised questions about; for example, the KSA and the rest of the world are working diligently to meet COVID-19 mitigation targets. To assess policy supervision in terms of the ability to achieve COVID-19 targets, this survey examines the operators necessary to achieve the SDGs in regard to improving COVID-19 mitigation and increasing economic growth. In particular, we examine COVID-19 mitigation under the setting of an N-shaped environmental Kuznets curve (N-shaped EKC) in the KSA. To identify the COVID-19 shock in the KSA, the effects of oil price and oil rent on CO₂ emissions are examined. The results of the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and non-autoregressive distributed lag (NARDL) bound testing approach indicate that due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the inverted N-shaped EKC hypothesis is validated in the long term. Empirically, we find that oil price strengthens the relationship of level, quadratic and cubic of economic growth and environmental quality while oil rent weakens this relationship. Additionally, the long-term incidences of positive shocks on oil price in the presence of COVID-19 outbreak are not similar to the negative shock to CO₂ emissions, implying the existence of asymmetric impacts on carbon dioxide emissions in long-term forms. Our research implies that an oil price shock could be judicious for macro guidance of the economy in the KSA. Our findings are helpful for policymakers and investors in terms of their settlement planning because they can be used to evaluate prospective courses of economic profitability under the COVID-19 shock.