Investigating the Linkage between Economic Growth, Electricity Access, Energy Use, and Population Growth in Pakistan

Abstract

Electricity is a versatile form of energy that plays a vital role in fulfilling the daily requirements of human life. The primary aim of this study was to investigate and explore the link between economic growth, electricity access, energy use, and population growth in Pakistan for the period 1990–2016. An autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration was applied to investigate the causality link between the study variables. These tests shed light on the long-run connection among the variables; further, the results revealed that the electricity access to the total population, electricity access to the urban population, energy usage, population growth, and urban population growth had a significant impact on economic growth, while the electricity access to the rural population and rural population growth had a negative impact on the economic growth in Pakistan. According to these findings, this study recommends that the government of Pakistan pay further attention to increasing its electricity production from different sources, including hydroelectric, solar, oil, and gas, and nuclear in order to fulfill the country’s demands.

Tourism and Development in Developing Economies: A Policy Implication Perspective

“…FDI comes from four major sectors: energy, banking and finance, telecommunications, and food and beverages [50]. Pakistan's economy had been growing at an average rate of over 7.6% per annum from 2003 to 2008 [50], which increased the demand for energy [52], as exhibited in Figure 2. Agriculture is the backbone of Pakistan's economy and has been designated by the government as the engine of national economic growth and poverty reduction; the mix trends in this sector are due to the availability of water and technological resources, and the economic growth in 2007 was highly linked to agriculture production [50].…”

Drivers and Barriers for Efficient Energy Management Practices in Energy-Intensive Industries: A Case-Study of Iron and Steel Sector

“…Certainly, with depletion of natural gas reserves, Pakistan has to rely on liquefied natural gas (LNG) import, and so from 0.7% to 8.7% overall share of LNG in energy end-use from 2015 to 2018 [52]. Moreover, economic growth and population growth link with an increase in overall energy end-use of a country, and for Pakistan, from 2013 to 2018 GDP growth was around 30% and annual population growth stated greater than 2% [53]. Pakistan Energy Efficiency and Conservation Board (PEECB) is the governing body that looks after energy efficiency related policies and programs.…”

How COVID-19 shock will drive the economy and climate? A data-driven approach to model and forecast

“…Moreover, the industrial service sectors in the GDP may increase energy intensity. Rehman and Deyuan ( 2018 ) analyzed the role of GDP in energy consumption in Pakistan using an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL). The results demonstrated that energy usage and urban population growth have a significant impact on economic growth.…”

“…It is believed that energy is the lifeblood of the economy, which is subject to policies and market forces of demand-supply. It is equally important for both developed and developing economies and for industrial sectors to achieve economic development and social stability (Rehman and Deyuan 2018 ). The consistencies of energy-related policies are dependent on economic, political, and environmental factors that decide the technology to achieve future demand.…”

“…Furthermore, this failure of polices in the energy sector results in power shortages and results in a GDP loss of 2.4 %, unemployment and exports of 0.53 million (Aziz et al 2010 ). The annual demand for electricity rises by 9% as compared with a 7% growth in supply, which creates a gap (Rehman and Deyuan 2018 ). The power sectors are never able to catch up with the increasing energy demand.…”