Long-run equilibrium relationship between energy consumption and CO emissions: a dynamic heterogeneous analysis on North Africa.

Environmental protection and sustainable development are inextricably linked. This linkage is particularly crucial for North Africa, where the use of carbon-intensive energies has created environmental and economic challenges. Amazingly, limited studies on the connection between energy consumption and environmental quality has been conducted to help with policy options to minimize the above menace in the region. Inspired by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, this study contributed to filling this gap by examining the energy consumption-CO emission nexus in North Africa for the period 1990 to 2018. In order to account for cross-sectional dependence, endogeneity, and slope heterogeneity that are mostly ignored by some conventional econometric techniques, this exploration adopted second generation econometric methods that are robust to the aforestated issues in its analysis. From the results, the studied panel was heterogeneous and cross-sectionally correlated. Also, the investigated series were first differenced stationary and cointegrated in the long-run. The cross-sectional augmented autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) and the dynamic common correlated effects mean group (DCCEMG) estimators were adopted to explore the elasticities of the explanatory variables and from the results, energy consumption worsened environmental quality in the region due to its positive influence on CO emissions. Also, urbanization and economic growth increased the rate of CO emissions in the countries. On the causal connections amid the series, bidirectional causalities between energy consumption and CO emissions, between urbanization and CO emission, between economic growth and CO emissions, and between urbanization and energy consumption were unraveled. Finally, unidirectional causalities from economic growth to energy consumption, and from economic growth to urbanization were confirmed. It is recommended that countries in North Africa should shift to the consumption of clean energies to help them attain low-carbon economy. Unavailability of data for some periods was the major limitation of the study. Therefore, in future when such data become available, similar explorations could be conducted to confirm the robustness of the study's results.