Agriculture development and CO2 emissions nexus in Saudi Arabia.

Haider Mahmood,Maham Furqan,Nawaz Ahmad,Zafrul Allam,Tarek Tawfik Yousef Alkhateeb,Maleeha Mohammed Zaaf Al-Qahtani,Shihe Fu

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0225865

Abstract

The agriculture sector may help to improve the environment of any country. The purpose of this research is to test the existence of environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis while keeping the energy consumption and agriculture share in income into account and analyze their effects on the CO2 emissions per capita of Saudi Arabia. We test both symmetrical, asymmetrical and quadratic effects of agriculture sector on the CO2 emissions. An inverted U-shaped relationship between gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and CO2 emissions per capita is found. Hence, EKC hypothesis is validated with a turning point at GDP per capita of 77,068 constant Saudi Riyal. Further, a negative and significant effect of agriculture sector on the CO2 emissions per capita has been found both in symmetrical and asymmetrical analyses. The magnitudes of effects of increasing and decreasing agriculture share are found statistically different on the CO2 emissions, and rising agriculture share in GDP has larger effect than that of decreasing agriculture share. An inverted U-shaped relationship is also found between agriculture share in GDP and CO2 emissions per capita with a turning point at 3.22% agriculture share in GDP.

Highlights

Though economic development in the modern age is substantially dependent on industrialization as well as the use of modern technology
Using period 1971-2014, Raggad [32] investigated the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis, and the results indicated that income has a monotonic and positive effect on the carbon dioxide emissions (CDE)
Agriculture development and CO2 emissions their first differences, all test statistics corroborate the stationarity of all variables at the 5% level of significance except LECPCt which is stationary at 10%

Summary

Introduction

Though economic development in the modern age is substantially dependent on industrialization as well as the use of modern technology. The role of traditional agriculture sector is still significant since it provides a base for the development of an agro-based industry and is a major source of food. Industrialization is said to be responsible for displacing the traditional sector as resources are reallocated between segments from the agriculture to the industry [1,2]. Despite these structural changes in many countries, the agriculture sector is still a matter of concern today for many economies as it may have positive or adverse environmental effects. Due to production activities, one cannot ignore the negative externalities of agriculture inputs, which may cause environmental degradation through greenhouse

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