Ramesh CHANDRA DAS
Department of Economics, Katwa College, West Bengal, India-713130, Phone No. +919474783455
ramesh051073@gmail.com
Abstract
The developmental gap among the countries or regions sometimes depends on the narrowing of the gap between carbon emissions as the latter leads to more industrial growth. The present study endeavors to test whether the BRICS nations are converging in terms of per capita CO2 emission over time for the period 1992-2014. We have applied the Barro and Sala-i-Martin’s (2004) unconditional and conditional β convergence definitions, and σ convergence definition on the data of the World Bank for the said period. The results show that there were no signs of cross country convergence in terms of β convergence definition (or the catching up process) but the countries were converging in line with the σ convergence definition for three different time durations indicating pre entry to and post entry of the BRICS Group. Attempting to a set of conditional variables like fuel consumption, energy intensity, per capita growth rate, FDI flow, trade openness, population, import share to GDP, etc. we did not find any such variable explaining whether there were any sort of conditional convergence. The cross country convergence in income in the group can also be attributable to this CO2 convergence.
Keywords: Per capita CO2 emission, β convergence, σ convergence, BRICS
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