Does higher energy efficiency growth homogeneously affect carbon emission growth rate across developing Sub-Saharan African nations? The importance of utilizing clean energy

Abstract

Establishing a sustainable environment and acquiring a carbon-neutral status require Sub-Saharan African nations to reduce their year-on-year growth rates of carbon emission levels. Thus, this study considers a sample of 38 countries from this region and selects the time period from 2000 to 2020 for analyzing the annual carbon emission growth rate influencing impacts of energy efficiency, clean energy, institutional quality, international trade, and net receipts of foreign direct investment. Overall, for the full sample of Sub-Saharan African nations, the results verify that the enhancing the growth rate of energy efficiency improvement reduces both total and per capita annual carbon emission growth rates. Besides, the results endorse that enhancing renewable energy shares of the final energy consumption profiles and promoting good governance-led betterment of institutional quality also plunge emission growth rates in the long run. More importantly, energy efficiency improvement, renewable energy consumption, and better quality institutions are observed to jointly exert carbon emission growth rate-impeding effects, as well. By contrast, more openness to international trade is not seen to influence the carbon emission growth rates of the Sub-Saharan African nations of concern. Lastly, a greater share of net foreign direct investment receipts in the national output level is evidenced to boost annual carbon emission growth rates across this region; consequently, the pollution haven hypothesis is verified. Furthermore, these above-mentioned findings are found to be heterogeneous across groups of low-income and middle-income Sub-Saharan African nations. Accordingly, in line with the findings, a couple of policies are recommended to the governments of the Sub-Saharan African countries in order to guide them in designing effective environmental sustainability policies that are relevant for tackling climate change-related atrocities in the future.

Keywords: Carbon emissions; Energy efficiency; Environmental sustainability; Renewable energy transition; Sub-Saharan Africa.