On the Interaction among Economic Growth, Energy-Electricity Consumption, CO2 Emissions, and Urbanization in Latin America

Abstract

This paper is aimed at studying the dynamics and long-run interaction among changes in CO2 emissions, economic growth, changes in energy and electricity use, and changes from rural to urban population among Latin American countries (LA) during the period from 1990 to 2014. A Panel VEC (VAR) approach using data from the World Bank shows that the first and second differences in the log of the proportion of the urban population to total population explain: CO2 emissions, GDP per capita, energy-electricity per capita, and the urbanization process. Moreover, CO2 emissions are cointegrated with the first difference in the log of the proportion of urban population. The empirical results show no evidence of the existence of an environmental Kuznets curve. Moreover, it is not possible to generalize the nature of the economic growth-energy consumption-urbanization and CO2 emissions relationships across different latitudes. Finally, a limitation of this study is that the limited availability of data for several countries in the LA region restricts the scope of the econometric analysis.