Empirical study on the determinants of CO₂emissions: evidence from OECD countries

Abstract

This paper empirically investigates the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) for CO 2 emissions in the cases of 11 OECD countries by taking into account the role of nuclear energy in electricity production. The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration is employed as the estimation method. Our results indicate that energy consumption has a positive impact on CO 2 emissions in most countries in the study. However, the impact of trade is not statistically significant. The results provide evidence for a role of nuclear power in reducing CO 2 emissions only in some countries. Additionally, although the estimated long-run coefficients of income and its square satisfy the EKC hypothesis in Finland, Japan, Korea and Spain, only Finland's EKC turning point is inside the sample period of the study, providing poor evidence in support of the EKC hypothesis.

Analyzing the Impact of Nuclear Power on CO2 Emissions

“…This study avoids the construction of an ad-hoc model in analyzing changes in CO 2 emissions regarding changes in nuclear power proportion in this respect, but adds nuclear power proportion as an additional variable to the well-known EKC model. A similar attempt is utilized by Iwata et al [5][6][7]. It is expected that β 1 has a positive value while β 2 has a negative one if the EKC hypothesis is valid for (7).…”

“…Recently, several studies attempted to investigate the relationship between nuclear power and CO 2 emissions in the context of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework [5][6][7]. The original EKC hypothesis presumes an inverse U-shaped relationship between environmental pollution and income per capita (we refer readers to Kaika and Zervas [8] for an extensive overview of this topic).…”

The effect of energy consumption, urbanization, trade openness, industrial output, and the political stability on the environmental degradation in the MENA (Middle East and North African) region

“…[32] 1990e2008 Middle East CO 2 emission Energy consumption and GDP. [30] 1963e2003 OECD CO 2 emission Nuclear energy production and GDP.…”

CO2 emissions and economic activity: Heterogeneity across countries and non-stationary series

“…Therefore, the empirical strategy followed in this study will allow to determine the existence of a stationary linear combination of the variables involved that led to a long run relationship. This approach has been previously employed by Perman and Stern (2003) and Iwata et al (2009 and2010).…”