On the convergence of ecological footprint in African countries: New evidences from panel stationarity tests with factors and gradual shifts.

Convergence of the environmental indicators has been one of the significant research areas for researchers since the study of Strazicich and List (2003) was published. Earlier papers have concentrated on investigating the existence of the convergence of indicators of the environment by using carbon emissions as a pollution indicator. However, some researchers have criticized the use of carbon emission as a one-dimensional indicator and proposed using ecological footprint as a more comprehensive indicator. The primary aim of this paper is to examine whether stochastic convergence of ecological footprint exists in 49 African countries from 1973 to 2018 by employing a battery of traditional stationarity methods and a newly proposed stationary method with smooth shifts and a combination of p-values. The empirical results show that panel findings of the conventional stationarity test with no structural shifts reveal that ecological footprint follows a stationary process. In contrast, panel findings of the traditional stationarity method with sharp and smooth changes and the newly developed stationary method with smooth shifts and a combination of p-values reveal that ecological footprint follows a non-stationary process. Moreover, the majority of individual results show that the ecological footprint follows a convergent pattern in 38 African countries, whereas it follows a divergent pattern in the remainder. Therefore, the main finding indicates the stochastic convergence of ecological footprint in African countries is validated. The policy outcomes of the empirical results are given in the body of the paper.