Abstract
This study estimates the impact of wood fuel consumption on economic growth in 19 sub-Saharan African countries over the 1979-2017 period. The study employs dynamic macro-panel estimators, which comprises pooled mean group (PMG), mean group (MG), and dynamic fixed effects (DFE). The estimated result reveals that PMG is the most efficient estimator among the three estimators based on the Hausman h-test. The results from PMG model reveal that wood fuel consumption has significant negative impact on economic growth. Also, when an interaction term between labor and wood fuel consumption was included in the model and estimated, the coefficient of wood fuel consumption yields negative and significant coefficient. This suggests that the interaction term has a negative and significant effect on economic growth. These results unveil that wood fuel consumption negatively and significantly affect economic growth, both directly and indirectly. The policy recommendations from this study are as follows: (1) Governments of these countries should provide adequate and affordable modern fuels to the populace; especially rural dwellers to decrease the use of wood fuel for cooking and heating (2) policy makers should intensify awareness campaign on the risk and danger wood fuel poses to economic growth so as to discourage its use and (3) policy makers should provide adequate solar powered stoves and solar-powered room heaters as cheap substitutes to the use of wood fuel for cooking and heating. These recommendations will assist in negating the negative effects of wood fuel consumption on economic growth of the region.
Highlights
About 50% of the world’s population is exposed to indoor air pollution with sub-Saharan Africa having the highest figure due to the consumption of traditional biomass fuels
Having discovered that most existing literature studied the aggregate impact of biomass consumption on economic growth, this study focuses on one major component of biomass, which is wood fuel, on the economic growth using different methodological framework
The results reveal that wood fuel consumption has a significant negative impact on economic growth in the long-run according to both pooled mean group (PMG) and mean group (MG) estimators, while the long-run coefficient of wood fuel consumption yielded by dynamic fixed effects (DFE) estimator suggests a negative but insignificant impact on economic growth
Summary
About 50% of the world’s population is exposed to indoor air pollution with sub-Saharan Africa having the highest figure due to the consumption of traditional biomass fuels. The rural settlements relying mostly on fuelwood (i.e., firewood), while the urban settlements depend mainly on charcoal These wood fuels provide energy source to most small- and medium-scale industries in both rural and urban centers such as bread making industries, brick-making industries, beer brewing industries, tobacco curing industries, etc. Despite the importance of wood fuel in providing energy to the households, small, and medium industries of the region, it is perceived to be detrimental to the region’s economy. This is because; indoor air pollution from burning of wood fuel is linked to premature deaths from acute and chronic cardiovascular diseases, and other respiratory diseases [2]
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