Carbon dioxide emissions, economic growth and openness in Turkey: An ARDL model

Abstract

In this thesis, I examine the effects of economic growth and trade openness on carbon dioxide emissions in Turkey for the period 1960-2014. Before the empirical analysis, there is an overview about the recent literature in this nexus. I try to analyze the growth of the carbon dioxide emissions in Turkey by conducting an Autoregressive distributed lags (ARDL) model with a structural break. I apply Toda Yamamoto procedure of Granger causality to test the direction of causality among variables. Estimated models show that there is a long run relationship, thus a cointegration, between economic growth, trade openness and carbon dioxide emissions in Turkey. Although there are improvements in terms of energy efficiency, current policy measures are not enough to mitigate the increase in carbon dioxide emissions over the years.