CO2 EMISSIONS AND ECONOMIC GROWTH IN SOME SELECTED COUNTRIES OF ECOWAS: PANEL DATA APPROACH

Abstract

Climate change and its impact on economic growth or vice versa is an important burning issue in the present world and therefore the present world and its popu-lation, especially in West Africa, are bound to face various calamities in recent times and the excessive emission of carbon (1.8 per cent of total carbon emission by the world’s emission) is one of the important reasons behind it. Therefore, it is very important to examine the relationship between carbon emissions and eco-nomic growth in the region and for this, the present article is focusing over some selected countries of Economic Community of West African States (ECOW-AS) and therefore the 10 ECOWAS countries are selected randomly, out of 15 ECOWAS countries and 32 years of data from 1991-2022 are utilized which is sourced from World Development Indicators (WDI), World Bank and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Bulletins. A panel data regression technique employed for the analysis of data. The Fixed Effect Model (FEM) estimates indicates that the out of eight explanatory variables four are negatively associated with Co2 emissions and one is statistically significant while other three are insignificant statistically. The Random Effect Model (REM) estimates pointed out that the out of eight independent variables three are having negative effects over the Co2 emission and five are having positive impact over the emissions. Therefore, the study perceived that emission of Co2, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and in-dustrial growth are not enough to lead the climate change in the region.