Drivers of industrial and non-industrial greenhouse gas emissions

Abstract

Though there has been extensive analysis of the drivers of aggregate carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production, there has been much less analysis of the drivers of greenhouse gases in general and especially of aggregate emissions of greenhouse gases from agriculture, forestry, and other land uses, which we call non-industrial emissions in this paper. We statistically analyze the relationship between both industrial and non-industrial greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth and other potential drivers for 129 countries over the period from 1971 to 2010. Our analysis combines the three main approaches in the literature into a single framework for investigating the evolution of emissions and income. We find that economic growth is a driver of both industrial and non-industrial emissions, though economic growth has twice the effect on industrial emissions. The time effect is negative for both sources of emissions, though this effect is larger for non-industrial emissions. There is also convergence in emissions intensity for both types of emissions but given these other effects there is no evidence for an environmental Kuznets curve.