Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

The objective of this thesis is to analyze the relationship between countries’ ICT use and CO2 emissions at four levels of income: high-income, upper-middle income, lower-middle income, and low income. The analysis is conducted using a panel fixed effects approach with Driscoll and Kraay standard errors, where the total dataset is collected from the World Development Index Data Bank and consists of 122 countries during the period 1997-2015. Following previous literature and the theory of the Environmental Kuznets Curve, ICT are expected to follow an inverted U-shaped relationship to CO2 per capita where the latter is the dependent variable and internet users as a percentage of total population and mobile subscriptions per 100 inhabitants are included as two proxies for ICT. The major findings of this thesis are that the relationship between ICT and emissions that has been found in previous studies, is not as evident when investigating the four income levels. Neither is the EKC between income and emissions as clear as previously stressed. Moreover, supporting the main critiques towards the theoretical framework of EKC, another issue is the heterogeneity across countries that still make investigation difficult using any types of methodologies and global datasets.