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Does energy consumption contribute to environmental pollutants? evidence from SAARC countries

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Abstract

The objective of the study is to examine the causal relationship between energy consumption and environmental pollutants in selected South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries, namely, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Srilanka, over the period of 1975–2011. The results indicate that energy consumption acts as an important driver to increase environmental pollutants in SAARC countries. Granger causality runs from energy consumption to environmental pollutants, but not vice versa, except carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in Nepal where there exists a bidirectional causality between CO2 and energy consumption. Methane emissions in Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Srilanka and extreme temperature in India and Srilanka do not Granger cause energy consumption via both routes, which holds neutrality hypothesis. Variance decomposition analysis shows that among all the environmental indicators, CO2 in Bangladesh and Nepal exerts the largest contribution to changes in electric power consumption. Average precipitation in India, methane emissions in Pakistan, and extreme temperature in Srilanka exert the largest contribution.

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Notes

  1. If the series are integrated with the mixture of order of integration, i.e., I(0) and I(1), it implies bond testing approach which was proposed by Pesaran et al. (2001).

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Acknowledgments

This work was financially supported by the National 985 Project of Non-traditional Security at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, People’s Republic of China. The authors are thankful to the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. Any remaining errors are the authors’ own responsibility.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Public Administration, Huazhong University of Science and Technology (HUST), 1037, Luoyu Road, Wuhan, People’s Republic of China

    Ghulam Akhmat & Tan Shukui

  2. Department of Management Sciences, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan

    Khalid Zaman

  3. Department of Computer Sciences, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan

    Danish Irfan

  4. Department of Humanities, COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Abbottabad, Pakistan

    Muhammad Mushtaq Khan

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  1. Ghulam Akhmat
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  2. Khalid Zaman
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  3. Tan Shukui
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  4. Danish Irfan
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  5. Muhammad Mushtaq Khan
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Correspondence to Khalid Zaman.

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Responsible editor: Philippe Garrigues

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Akhmat, G., Zaman, K., Shukui, T. et al. Does energy consumption contribute to environmental pollutants? evidence from SAARC countries. Environ Sci Pollut Res 21, 5940–5951 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-014-2528-1

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