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.