Urbanization and carbon emissions: looking at the role of mobile phone adoption in Sub-Saharan African countries

Abstract

Despite the plethora of studies on urbanization-carbon dioxide emissions relationship, studies that consider the role of mobile phone adoption are limited in the ecological literature. This study relied on the stochastic impacts by regression on population, affluence and technology (STIRPAT) analytical framework for modelling environmental impacts and adopted fixed effects ordinary least squares with Driscoll and Kraay standard errors (FE-DK) and the novel method of moments quantile regression (MM-QR) estimation techniques to examine the role of mobile phone adoption in the urbanization-carbon dioxide emissions link for 21 SSA economies, spanning 1995-2017. Results of estimation based on FE-DK statistically provide support for population size, per capita income, energy intensity, urbanization and mobile phone adoption as determinants of the two forms of carbon dioxide emissions (consumption-based carbon dioxide emissions and production-based carbon dioxide emissions). Distributional effects of these factors explain that (i) urbanization has heterogeneous positive effect on the two forms of carbon dioxide emissions, with higher impact in economies with relatively lower level of carbon dioxide emissions and (ii) mobile phone adoption has heterogeneous negative effect on the two forms of carbon dioxide emissions, with greater impact in economies with relatively higher level of carbon dioxide emissions. The study discussed the policy implications of these results in the context of SSA countries.