Does economic integration damage or benefit the environment? Africa's experience

Atif Awad

Energy Policy, 2019, vol. 132, issue C, 991-999

Abstract: The leaders of African nations have committed to the establishment of the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) over the coming years. Improved links among the African nations, via increased intra-regional trade, have been considered as an essential mechanism to produce desired growth run-overs and to support regional economic improvement. However, remarkable theoretical and empirical evidence has shown that increased trade might damage the environment and therefore may hinder the effort towards sustainable development and poverty reduction on the continent. The present paper seeks to investigate and test the impact of intra-Africa trade using two measurements of environmental pollutants, namely CO2 and MP10 whilst integrating economic growth, and energy consumption. The study used a panel dataset regarding 46 African countries over the period 1990–2017. To carry out the empirical analysis, the latest panel estimation techniques were employed. More specifically, and for the urbaneness purpose, we employed a parametric technique, which is dynamic OLS, and a non-parametric approach which is FMOLS. The results of both methods suggested that intra-Africa trade improved environmental quality on the continent. In addition, the results confirmed the presence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. The findings also indicated that whilst the consumption of energy played a vital role in the deterioration of the environment, its impact remained marginal. Overall the results implied that intra-regional trade and the environment quality were mutually supportive in Africa.

Keywords: Economic integration; Environment; Trade; Africa; Free trade area (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 F15 Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301421519304422
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:enepol:v:132:y:2019:i:c:p:991-999

DOI: 10.1016/j.enpol.2019.06.072

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Policy is currently edited by N. France

More articles in Energy Policy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().