Investigating the Effect of Technology Development on Economic Growth and Controlling the Spread of Pollution in the Agricultural Sector (by Implementing the Law on Targeted Energy Subsidies)

The use of new technologies reduces the spread of pollution; However, due to the rebound effect (RE), it needs further investigation. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of technology advance (energy efficiency and change of energy type) on pollution by calculating the effect of economic growth and testing the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) using the annual time series information of Iran's agricultural sector from 1981 to 2017 using the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach. The research findings indicate that with the increase in energy prices due to the implementation of the targeted subsidy law in Iran, the Kuznets environmental hypothesis is not confirmed. The simulation results of the economic growth scenario of the agricultural sector showed that each percentage increase of this variable increased the effect of energy efficiency on pollution reduction by 0.31% on average and the effect of energy substitution on the increase of pollution increased by 18.92% during the simulation period.