Comparative Study Of The Income Elasticity Of CO₂ Emissions For Different Income Countries

This paper estimates the short-and long-run income elasticity on carbon dioxide emissions for 106 countries.We make a group of countries by the regional and income criteria following World Bank classifications and calculate the average income elasticity.We divide 106 countries into five regional sectors,Asia,Africa,Latin America,Europe and Middle east&North Africa,and into three income groups,High-Income,Middle-Income and Low-Income.Results show that the average short-and long-run elasticity of African countries are higher than the total average,particularly the long-run elasticity is much higher.On the other hand,for European countries,the average short-run elasticity is negative and long-run elasticity is positive,but very low.We can infer that the EKC could arise in European countries from these results.For the income group,the higher the income the lower the short-and long-run elasticity.It implies CO2 emissions through energy intensive industry account for small portion of the source of economic growth for high income countries.