Factors Influencing Carbon Dioxide Emissions in South Asian Economies: An Econometric Analysis

Climate Change and global warming are two concerning issues in the contemporary world. Greenhouse Gas emissions particularly carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are responsible for this climate change. Both natural and human made factors causes excessive CO2 emissions. This paper investigates the relationship between CO2 emissions and its human made causes such as fossil fuel energy consumption, income, agricultural production, population and forest in South Asian countries. Although pooled OLS, fixed effects (FE) and random effects (RE) model have been used in this study, the best fitting FE model shows that the highest effect on CO2 emissions was found for GDP while the lowest on it was for fossil fuel energy consumption. Though the study declared the validity of Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, contribution of forest over CO2 emissions is out of expectation (though statistically insignificant). Therefore, further research is required to re-investigate the influence of forest toward CO2 emissions to justify the REDD+ program in South Asia.