CO2 Emissions, Energy Consumption and Economic Growth in BRICS:An Empirical Analysis

In the last few decades, the rising levels of industrialization, urbanization, climbing: population and changes in lifestyle have increased the threat of global warming and climate changes. The Kyoto protocol of 1997 had the objective of reducing greenhouse gasses (GHG) emissions to 5.2 percent lower than the levels of 1990 during the period 2008-2012. The rise in greenhouse gasses emissions has been the major ongoing concern for both developed and developing countries. With the recent economic growth of the BRICS countries, emissions are expected to increase as BRICS countries use large quantities of fossil fuels for electricity generation, contributing to global warming. According to the UNEP emission gap report, 2015, three of the BRICS countries are the part of six largest emitters of CO2 in the world. This paper is an attempt to find the empirical relationship among three variables, i.e., CO2 emissions, economic growth rate (per capita GDP) and energy consumption in a panel of BRICS countries for the annual data set for the period 1991 to 2011. In this paper, we employed the Panel data both fixed and random effects and unit root test