Energy consumption, carbon emissions and economic growth nexus in Bangladesh: Cointegration and dynamic causality analysis

Abstract

The paper investigates the possible existence of dynamic causality between energy consumption, electricity consumption, carbon emissions and economic growth in Bangladesh. First, we have tested cointegration relationships using the Johansen bi-variate cointegration model. This is complemented with an analysis of an auto-regressive distributed lag model to examine the results' robustness. Then, the Granger short-run, the long-run and strong causality are tested with a vector error correction modelling framework. The results indicate that uni-directional causality exists from energy consumption to economic growth both in the short and the long-run while a bi-directional long-run causality exists between electricity consumption and economic growth but no causal relationship exists in short-run. The strong causality results indicate bi-directional causality for both the cases. A uni-directional causality runs from energy consumption to CO2 emission for the short-run but feedback causality exists in the long-run. CO2 Granger causes economic growth both in the short and in the long-run. An important policy implication is that energy (electricity as well) can be considered as an important factor for the economic growth in Bangladesh. Moreover, as higher energy consumption also means higher pollution in the long-run, policy makers should stimulate alternative energy sources for meeting up the increasing energy demand.