The current study employs a Granger causality test within a Quantile approach investigating CO2 emission determinants in China. Results show urbanization, financial development and openness to trade are leading determinants of CO2 emissions in China. These results highlight climate change issues while taking advantage of a new methodology to fill a gap in the current literature. Our findings show key implications for PRC government policy related to pollutant reduction policy.

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This study attempts to revisit the stochastic convergence of coal consumption for 39 countries through panel unit root test with both sharp and smooth breaks proposed by Bahmani-Oskooee et al. (2014). The empirical findings support convergence for 34 of 39 countries. The coal consumption for Ireland, China, South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam is divergence. That is, shocks to coal consumption for these five countries would make permanent effects on the move path. The time-varying fitted intercepts indicate the more robust estimation of this study. The traditional unit root tests perform lower efficiency on testing the stationarity of coal consumption. Besides, not only sharp breaks should be considered in the future studies, but also smooth breaks should be also approximated. Policy conservation policy would make transitory impacts on coal consumption for converging group, but permanently affect coal consumption for diverging group. For Ireland, China, South Africa, Indonesia and Vietnam, the policy conservation policy would indirectly affect aggregate economic sectors related to consume coal energy. However, to cut the increasing trend of coal consumption, other renewable energy should further be explored. Finally, some future research directions are recommended in the end.

This study applies a Quantile-on-Quantile model to investigate the emissions-economic growth relationship. Data from ten Asian countries for period of 1969–2019 is used. Both real GDP per capita and CO2 emissions data are used in this study. Empirical results from our Quantile-on-Quantile model show that the relationship between CO2 emissions and GDP varies across quantiles. Our findings indicate that most countries face a transformation of energy consumption structure, except for Japan and Singapore. Our results have important policy implications for the study countries.

Applying a mixed frequency vector autoregressive (MF-VAR) approach, we examine relationships betweenCO2 emissions and economic growth from 1970Q1 to 2019Q4 among G7 countries. We incorporate primary energy consumption as a control variable, to avoid any bias from an omitted variable. Our empirical results, using forecast error variance decomposition and a Granger causality check, suggest MF-VAR exhibits better explanatory ability over the more commonly used VAR model employing single frequency data. Results from LF-VAR exhibit a feedback loop connecting economic expansion and emissions of CO2 with one-way Granger causality from primary energy consumption to growth of the economies studied. MF-VAR model results also indicate, in G7 countries, economic expansion exhibits a one-way causal link to CO2 emissions in Canada, UK, and US cases. Interestingly, MF-VAR shows feedback between economic expansion and primary energy use in Germany, while LF-VAR quantifies the link from economic growth to CO2 emissions in Canada and from CO2 to economic growth in the UK. Results raise implications for the G7 samples’ policy makers.