On the causal nexus of road transport CO2 emissions and macroeconomic variables in Tunisia: Evidence from combined cointegration tests

Abstract

This paper investigates the causal relationship between road transportation energy consumption, fuel prices, transport sector value added and CO 2 emissions in Tunisia for the period 1980-2012. We apply the newly developed combined cointegration test proposed by Bayer and Hanck (2013) and the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration to establish the existence of long-run relationship in presence of structural breaks. The direction of causality between these variables is determined via vector error correction model (VECM).Our empirical exercise reveals that the cointegration is present. Energy consumption adds in CO 2 emissions. Fuel prices decline CO 2 emissions. Road infrastructure boosts in CO 2 emissions. Transport value-added also increases CO 2 emissions. The causality analysis indicates the bidirectional casual relationship between energy consumption and CO 2 emissions. Road infrastructure causes CO 2 emissions and similar is true from opposite side in Granger sense. The bidirectional causality is also found between transport value-added and CO 2 emissions. Fuel prices cause CO 2 emissions, energy consumption, road infrastructure and transport value-added. This paper provides new insights to policy makers to design a comprehensive energy, transport and environment policies for sustainable economic growth in long run.

The Multilevel Index Decomposition of Energy-Related Carbon Emission and Its Decoupling with Economic Growth in USA

“…16 2 emissions intensity has been dropping during the study period. (2) From the addictive decomposition of CO 2 emissions, we can arrive at some conclusions: economic activities effect was the chief factor of increasing the carbon dioxide emissions and energy intensity effect had significant impact on curbing the increase, in other words, it contributed to decreasing the carbon emissions.…”

“…According to Equation (16), results are shown in Table 4. As presented above, the decoupling effort (δ) can be divided into three states: strong decoupling, relative decoupling and no decoupling.…”

“…There are many studies on CO 2 emissions, however, most of the studies before tend to focus more on the impacts brought by the change of CO 2 emissions [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16] and how the greenhouse effect influences economic activities [17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. As for research methods, generally speaking, there are two approaches to the research: econometric analysis [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38] and decomposition methods [39][40][41][42][43][44].…”

Empirical Evidence from EU-28 Countries on Resilient Transport Infrastructure Systems and Sustainable Economic Growth

“…The fixed-effects approach was selected since the study was limited to a particular group of states [34]. Onward, the nexus between transport infrastructure, associated investments, emissions of carbon dioxide, and economic growth was explored through a panel vector autoregressive model [2,8,39,44,50,55,59,62,64,65,69,71,82,83,87,93,101,105]. Firstly, the unit root of each variable was examined, then the long-run cointegration link among the variables is investigated, and afterwards the panel vector error correction model (henceforth "PVECM") was estimated to infer the Granger causal associations [44].…”

“…With the purpose of analyzing the long-run connection between the variables, for the robust of the results, several tests of cointegration were employed [5,38,44,50,59,62,64,65,77,93,101,105]: Pedroni [109,110], Kao [111], and Johansen [112]. The series of transport infrastructure, related investments, carbon dioxide emissions from transport, and economic growth were defined as cointegrated when all of the series are established to be integrated with the same order [62].…”