CO2 emissions, growth, energy consumption and foreign trade in Sub-Sahara African countries

This paper analyzes the effect of economic growth, energy consumption and foreign trade on CO2 emissions on eight Sub-Sahara African countries, namely Botswana, Cameroon, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Senegal, South Africa and Togo. The ARDL bound testing approach to cointegration developed by Pesaran, Shin and Smith (2001) is used to test the long run relationship among the variables. Our findings show the existence of a long run relationship only in South Africa and Togo. The results show that energy consumption has an effect in increasing CO2 emissions in Botswana, Kenya, South Africa and Togo in the short term. Trade openness is not sufficient to improve environment quality in Kenya while it does in South Africa. Furthermore, we apply the Toda and Yamamoto (1995) Granger causality test, and find that Kenya is dependent on energy while economic growth and energy consumption have a neutral relationship in Cameroon, Senegal, South Africa and Togo, suggesting that an energy efficiency policy may be implemented. However, the econometric results should be interpreted with care, as the variables are found to be weakly stable over the study period.