Aka B. F. (2009). “Trade and Growth Impacts on Air Pollution in the Aggregated Sub-Saharan Africa and Selected African Countries”. Trade Policy Review, Vol. 2 (2009), pp. 60-84.
This paper examines the impacts of trade intensity as measured by the share of exports plus imports in GDP and economic growth proxies by the GDP per capita on air pollution as measured by CO 2 emissions. We focus first on Sub-Saharan Africa as a whole during the period 1961-2003 to see how trade intensity and GDP per capita growth have impacted CO 2 emissions in that zone, and secondly on each individual country of the SSA zone. We use an Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model to analyze both the short and long-run impacts of these variables on the environment. Our results indicate that for the aggregate SSA in the short-run a 1% increase in economic growth leads to 1.04% increase in CO 2 emission thus a degradation of air quality, while a 1% increase in trade intensity account for 0.15% decrease in pollution. Most importantly in the long-run, a 1% increase in GDP per capita contributes to 1.8% increase in air pollution while a 1% increase in trade intensity leads to 0.57% decrease in CO 2 emission thus beneficial to the environment. For individual countries, the results allow to classify them into three groups. For the first group composed of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Nigeria and South Africa, in the long-run economic expansion does have a negative impact on environment, whereas trade is beneficial to environment. For the second group of countries including the Central African Republic, Gabon, Ghana, Niger, Senegal and Togo, in the long-run equation economic expansion does have a positive impact on environment, while trade is not beneficial to environment. Concerning the third group of countries including Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cote d'Ivoire, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Rwanda and Zambia, in the long-run economic expansion does have a negative impact on environment, and trade is not beneficial to environment.