Determinants of carbon emissions in Argentina: The roles of renewable energy consumption and globalization

Abstract

This study aimed to evaluate the dynamic effects of globalization, renewable energy consumption, non-renewable energy consumption, and economic growth on carbon-dioxide emission levels in Argentina over the 1970–2018 period. The econometric methodology considered in this study involved applications of methods that are robust to handling structural break problems in the data. Among the major findings, the Maki cointegration, with multiple structural breaks, analysis revealed long-run associations between carbon-dioxide emissions, renewable and non-renewable energy consumption, globalization, and economic growth. The elasticity estimates from the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model analysis showed evidence of renewable energy consumption and globalization reducing the emissions while non-renewable energy consumption was found to boost the emissions, both in the short- and long-run. Besides, globalization and renewable energy consumption were found to jointly reduce the emissions while globalization and non-renewable energy consumption were found to jointly boost the emissions in the long-run only. Moreover, the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis was also verified in this study. Based on these key findings, several critically important policies are recommended.