Carbon dioxide emissions, economic growth, energy use, and urbanization in Saudi Arabia: evidence from the ARDL approach and impulse saturation break tests

Abstract

This study investigates the existence of long-run relationship between CO emissions, economic growth, energy use, and urbanization in Saudi Arabia over the period 1971-2014. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach with structural breaks, where structural breaks are identified with the recently impulse saturation break tests, is applied to conduct the analysis. The bounds test result supports the existence of long-run relationship among the variables. The existence of environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis has also been tested. The results reveal the non-validity of the EKC hypothesis for Saudi Arabia as the relationship between GDP and pollution is positive in both the short and the long run. Moreover, energy use increases pollution both in short and long run in the country. On the contrary, the results show a negative and significant impact of urbanization on carbon emissions in Saudi Arabia, which means that urban development is not an obstacle to the improvement of environmental quality. Consequently, policy-makers in Saudi Arabia should consider the efficiency enhancement, frugality in energy consumption, and especially increase the share of renewable energies in the total energy mix.

Role of Economic Growth, Financial Development, Trade, Energy and FDI in Environmental Kuznets Curve for Lithuania: Evidence from ARDL Bounds Testing Approach

“…These studies apply ARDL, ARDL bounds, ARDL with structural breaks, VECM Granger Causality, CUSUM, CUSUMSQ, DOLS, FOMLS, and Gregory and Hansen and Hatemi-J approaches. hold. For instance, Raggad (2018), Gill, Viswanathan, and Hassan (2018), , Katircioglu andKatircioglu (2018), andAl-Mulali et al (2018) confirms the non-validity of EKC hypothesis for Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Turkey, and Kenya respectively. Recently, reveals that coal consumption, oil consumption, economic growth, and natural gas consumption have a positive impact on the environmental degradations in Pakistan both in the short-run and long-run.…”

“…In this nexus, economic growth is both the problem and the solution for environmental degradation. Knowing this solution, many researchers investigated this issue for different countries and regions to tell whether economic growth can be a solution to environmental problems in that country or region (see Raggad, 2018;Bekhet & Othman, 2018;Shahzad, Kumar, Zakaria, & Hurr, 2017). Liobikiene, Mandravickaite, Krepstuliene, Bernatoniene, and Savickas (2017) reveal that none of the Baltic states, including Lithuania, has a clear policy framework for the greenhouse gases (GHG) emission reduction, even though GHG emission reduction is the critical priority in the Lithuanian Sustainable Development Strategy.…”

Agriculture development and CO2 emissions nexus in Saudi Arabia

“…They also found Granger causality from income per capita to pollution emissions. Using period 1971-2014, Raggad [32] investigated the EKC hypothesis, and the results indicated that income has a monotonic and positive effect on the CDE. Energy use and urbanization were seen to have a positive and negative impact on CO 2 emissions respectively.…”

The determinants and interrelationship of carbon emissions and economic growth in African economies: Fresh insights from static and dynamic models

“…Against this backdrop, numerous research studies have been dedicated to the determinants of emissions both in a single country case (Brizga, Feng, & Hubacek, 2013; Cansino, Román, & Ordonez, 2016; Chin, Puah, Teo, & Joseph, 2018; Mrabet & Alsamara, 2017; Raggad, 2018) and for a group of countries (Balogh & Jámbor, 2017; Dogan & Seker, 2016; Iwata, Okada, & Samreth, 2012; Li & Lin, 2015; Lin, Wang, Marinova, Zhao, & Hong, 2017; Moutinho, Moreira, & Silva, 2015; Sharma, 2011; Shuai et al, 2017; Yeh & Liao, 2017). China and the United States are the two biggest emitters of CO 2 (Liu & Xiao, 2018).…”