The Impact of Some Effective Factors on Emission of CO2 in Selected Countries of the MENA Region: Panel Quantile Regression Approach

Over the past decades, emissions of pollution and environmental protection have become one of the major concerns of developing countries, because these communities need to use energy to achieve high economic growth and more energy consumption brings more environmental pollution. Investigating influencing factors on the emission of pollutants, and in particular carbon dioxide gas, can be effective in planning for the control and management of pollutants. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of population size, GDP, energy intensity and urbanization on carbon dioxide emissions in selected countries of the Mena region during the years 2000-2017.

Factors affecting the emission of CO2 in selected countries of the MENA region have been investigated using Panel Quantile Regression model. Important feature of this model is the estimation of independent variables in different quantiles and their effect on the dependent variable, which greatly increases the accuracy of the estimate and the result of the estimate in each quantile can be seen separately.

Research findings show that population size except for quantiles of 0.05 and 0.1 has a positive and significant effect on carbon dioxide emissions. The energy intensity and GDP at all quantiles have a positive and significant effect on CO2 emissions. The relationship between urbanization and carbon dioxide is negative at all quantiles except 0.95 and only in 0.05, 0.1, 0.7 and 0.8 quantiles is significant.

In this study, given that GDP has the greatest impact on carbon dioxide emissions, it is recommended that by upgrading production technologies, preparation renewable energy infrastructure and issuing permits to enter less polluting industries into the countries studied, create the conditions that economic growth due to the increase in GDP to be accompanied by the lowest emissions of pollutants.