In recent years, following the continued rise in the level of degradation and pollution in developing and emerging economies, the debate on the costs, benefits and longer‐term implications of growth policies on the environment has intensified among stakeholders. Although economic expansion remains paramount in policy, ensuring environmental sustainability amidst the quest to stimulate growth in Ghana has assumed a central theme in its contemporary growth agenda. Exploring annual time series data spanning 1975–2015 this study examined, in Ghana, the environmental impact of economic expansion within the standard Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) framework. The Autoregressive Distributed Lagged bounds approach to cointegration did not confirm the existence of EKC for any of the environmental indicators in the short run, but was robustly established in the long run for CO2 emissions and energy consumption. This conclusion implies that, given the long‐run parameters of Ghana, beyond a certain income level, degradation emanating from energy consumption and CO2 emissions will eventually fall as the country's economy expands. The study is the first to examine the effect of economic expansion on three of the most important environmental indicators in Ghana and also to employ an environmentally adjusted income variable as a measure of environment sustainability.

The 19739/74 and 1979/1980 oil price shocks coupled with the unreliability of its supply as against the ever‐increasing demand for energy‐based inputs, further reinforced the stern implications that energy may have on economic development reducing energy intensity is often advocated as a way to ensure efficient utilisation of energy resources and minimising the adverse effects of its shortage on economic development. Using the annual time series data set spanning 1981–2014 this study examined, in Ghana where energy crises continue to immense adverse effects on the economy, the relationships between energy consumption and economic growth at the one hand, and that between energy intensity and economic growth on the other hand within the standard Environmental Kuznets Curve framework. In Autoregressive Distributed Lagged model estimation, there was strong evidence of the existence of a valid long‐run relationship between energy consumption and economic growth as well as energy intensity and economic growth.

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