Population dynamics and CO₂ emissions in the Arab region: an extended STIRPAT II model

ABSTRACT

Many Arab countries have been developing in a fast pace over the last two decades. This is now seen as putting considerable pressure on the natural environment through population growth, ecosystem stress and resource extraction. The potential for climate change arising from increasing carbon dioxide emissions threatens the likelihood of a more sustainable development model being achieved in many of these countries. The paper deals with Arab countries’ population-environment nexus with respect to climate change interactions. The paper adopts the STIRPAT II model, which measures the effect of population, wealth, technology and, institution quality on the environment. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions is adopted to measure the environmental impact. Both the static panel models and the dynamic heterogeneous panel models were employed to test the concept of ecological elasticity in the Arab world. The results show that the most efficient way for the Arab countries to minimize carbon emissions is to reduce population, affluence, energy intensity and enhance the institution quality. However, the Arab countries are currently on a trajectory of growing population and affluence.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab countries
• CO₂ emissions
• climate change
• governance
• STIRPAT model
• panel ARDL

JEL CLASSIFICATIONS:

• C33
• J11
• N55
• O13
• Q54
• Q56

Acknowledgment

The authors are most grateful to the journal editor and the anonymous reviewers as well as participants of the ‘Economic Research Forum 20th Annual Conference,’ Cairo, Egypt 2014, especially Atif Kubursi, Sam Hakim and Mahmoud Haddad for their valuable comments. Also a special thanks to Rahma Ali for her help in updating data and figures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Yasmine M. Abdelfattah http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2465-3757

John Adams http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2316-3606

Notes

1 The authors are currently working on a separate paper focusing on these specific elements in the context of Arab countries.

2 The twenty-one Arab countries included in the study are Algeria, Bahrain, Comoros, Djibouti, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Occupied Palestine, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia (SA), Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Yemen.