Carbon Dioxide Emissions, Urbanization and Population: Empirical Evidence in Sub Saharan Africa

Abstract

Urbanization and population have been viewed as two of the major contributors to global CO 2 emissions. This paper aims at examining empirically the relationship between urbanization, population and CO 2 emissions in 45 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. This goal was achieved by using a panel data from 1990-2010 and the newly established pooled mean group (PMG) estimator for dynamic heterogeneous panels. This study is a contribution to the empirics of climate change which has been an ongoing debate over the past decades now. The study establishes that an increase in both urbanization and population significantly increases CO 2 emissions both in the long and short run. Furthermore, the study finds that, CO 2 emissions of countries with large population like Nigeria and Ethiopia tend to grow faster following energy consumption as compared to countries with small population like Cape Verde and Equatorial Guinea. The study contributes to the existing literature and ongoing debate on climate change by using the newly developed heterogeneous panel cointegration techniques which have rarely been used to examine the impact of population and urbanization on CO 2 emissions of SSA countries.

The Effect of Manufacturing Activities and Economic Openness on Co2 Emissions in Ghana: An Autoregressive Distributed Lagged Bounds Approach

“…Tiwari et al (2022) found a positive relationship between trade openness and CO 2 emissions in India. Adusah-Poku (2016) reported similar findings for a study of Sub-Saharan African countries. Abokyi et al (2021) employed the ARDL model to study the role of trade openness in electricity consumption and carbon emissions in Ghana.…”

“…Grossman & Krueger (1991) first explored the empirical relationship between trade and emissions, categorizing the effects into scale, technique, and composite. Subsequent studies on the environmental effect of trade have reported ambiguous findings (Adusah-Poku, 2016;and Kwakwa et al, 2019). Tiwari et al (2022) found a positive relationship between trade openness and CO 2 emissions in India.…”

“…The literature on the environmental implication of economic activities has focused mostly on internal factors (Shahbaz, Khraief, and Jemaa 2015;Adusah-Poku 2016;Shahbaz et al 2016;Twerefou, Adusah-Poku, and Bekoe 2016;Adu and Denkyirah 2018) or external factors (Seker, Ertugrul, and Cetin 2015;Shahbaz et al 2017Shahbaz et al , 2019Pazienza 2019), and cases where attempts are made to consider the total factors (Aboagye, 2017;Huang et al, 2022), the theoretical relationships are not explicitly considered. The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis and the pollution haven/hallo hypothesis (PHH) are the two theoretical concepts mostly employed to explain the environmental effect of economic expansion resulting from total (local and international) activities.…”

Towards sustainability: The effect of industries on CO2 emissions

“…It was found that growing urbanization and population could lower CO2 emissions significantly in the short and long run. Moreover, it was concluded that CO2 emissions grew faster due to energy use in more populated countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia than in less populated countries like Cape Verde and Equatorial Guinea (Poku, 2016). Katircioglu studied the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) and the oil price effect on that in Turkey.…”

Symmetric and Asymmetric Impact of Poverty, Income Inequality, and Population on Carbon Emission in Pakistan: New Evidence From ARDL and NARDL Co-Integration

“…The ongoing environmental degradation has placed numerous countries under pressure to decrease CO 2 e and to focus on low-carbon emitter economies. As a result, many small and large series of agreements, such as the "Paris Agreement, " "Kyoto Protocol, " and the "United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change" (UNFCCC) have been made among different developing and developed countries to control and decrease CO 2 e. The reduction of CO 2 e has become important in recent years because many industrialized and developed countries have applied their policies to mitigate Co 2 e (Zhang et al, 2014;Adusah-Poku, 2016;Yang et al, 2017). However, the ongoing concerns for sustainable development have increased over the years as the quality of the environment has declined because of economic activities.…”