Relationships among environmental pollution, energy use and economic growth: a global perspective

Abstract

This study examines the relationships between the environmental pollution, energy use and economic growth of countries around the world using secondary sources of 44 countries collected from the World Energy Outlook 2019. Cointegration tests with sophisticated econometric panel models and autoregressive distributed lag models were used to measure the relationship between the above variables ranging from 1990 to 2018. Our study’s empirical model finds that high energy usage improves a country’s economic position but at the cost of environmental pollution (carbon dioxide emissions). It also observes that countries in the European Union, the Commonwealth of Independent States, and North and Latin American across the Pacific region support the hypothesis of an inverted N-shaped environmental Kuznets curve. However, the situation in Asia and Africa suggests the N-shaped environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, which indicates that these countries experience ups and downs in their environmental quality all the time and their environmental quality is substandard at any point in time. Those countries that show both long-term and short-term relationships among these three factors must adopt environmental safety measures such as renewable energy sources and green concepts to reduce their levels of carbon dioxide emissions and increase their environmental quality.

Keywords: Environmental, Pollution, Energy use, Economic growth