Road Transport, Economic Growth and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in the BRIICS: Conditions For a Low Carbon Economic Development

In this article, we investigate the relationship between economic growth and CO2 emissions per capita due to road transport in order to test the validity of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. We test an EKC model on a sample of six emerging countries (Brazil, Russia, India, Indonesia, China and South Africa so-called BRIICS) using yearly data from 2000 to 2010. Empirical results reveal an inverted U-shaped EKC curve relating CO2 emissions per capita due to road transport to the level of economic development (level of GDP percapita). In all models tested, the turning point exceeds the current GDP per capita of the richest country of the group, which means that it would happen virtually in a far future or after a strong growth episode. Results show that the turning point of this EKC for road transport depends on population density and the integration of government effectiveness into the BRIICS’s economic development policy. However, when Russia is omitted from the group, the EKC hypothesis does not hold anymore and CO2 emissions per capita are uniformly increasing with per capita GDP. The main policy implication from our results is that policy makers should not base their policy on the EKC hypothesis: increasing the per capita GDP level alone cannot reduce CO2 emissions per capita from road transport and without a significant change in policy, economic growth will exacerbate CO2 emissions.