Empirical study on the environmental Kuznets curve for CO2 in France: The role of nuclear energy

Abstract

This paper attempts to estimate the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) in the case of France by taking the role of nuclear energy in electricity production into account. We adopt the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration as the estimation method. Additionally, we examine the stability of the estimated models and investigate the Granger causality relationships between the variables in the system. The results from our estimation provide evidence supporting the EKC hypothesis and the estimated models are shown to be stable over the sample period. The uni-direction running from other variables to CO 2 emissions are confirmed from the casualty tests. Specifically, the uni-directional causality relationship running from nuclear energy to CO 2 emissions statistically provides evidence on the important role of nuclear energy in reducing CO 2 emissions.

Analyzing the Impact of Nuclear Power on CO2 Emissions

“…This study avoids the construction of an ad-hoc model in analyzing changes in CO 2 emissions regarding changes in nuclear power proportion in this respect, but adds nuclear power proportion as an additional variable to the well-known EKC model. A similar attempt is utilized by Iwata et al [5][6][7]. It is expected that β 1 has a positive value while β 2 has a negative one if the EKC hypothesis is valid for (7).…”

“…Recently, several studies attempted to investigate the relationship between nuclear power and CO 2 emissions in the context of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework [5][6][7]. The original EKC hypothesis presumes an inverse U-shaped relationship between environmental pollution and income per capita (we refer readers to Kaika and Zervas [8] for an extensive overview of this topic).…”

CO2 emissions and economic activity: Heterogeneity across countries and non-stationary series

“…Therefore, the empirical strategy followed in this study will allow to determine the existence of a stationary linear combination of the variables involved that led to a long run relationship. This approach has been previously employed by Perman and Stern (2003) and Iwata et al (2009 and2010).…”

Financial development and environmental quality: The way forward

“…Similarly, in the energy economics literature provides, many studies have investigated the EKC hypothesis by using time-series data for individual countries. For instance, Akbostanci et al (2009), Iwata et al (2010), Shahbaz et al (2012), Tiwari et al (2013), Lau et al (2014) and Ozturk and Al-Mulali (2015) have validated the EKC for Turkey, France, Pakistan, India, Malaysia and Cambodia, respectively. Tamazian et al (2009) argue that the omission of financial development from carbon dioxide emissions functions leads to erroneous empirical results.…”