This paper investigates the relationship between greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, and output growth among African OPEC countries (Libya, Nigeria, Angola, Algeria, Equatorial Guinea, and Gabon) using the panel autoregressive distributed lag model (PARDL) estimated by means of mean group (MG) and pooled mean group (PMG) for the period 1970–2016. The paper estimated three panel models comprising the components of greenhouse gasses which includes nitrous oxide, carbon dioxide (CO2), and methane and examined their relationship with economic growth and energy consumption. The findings of the study showed evidence of a positive impact of economic growth on both CO2 and methane emissions in the long run. Its impact on nitrous oxide emissions although positive was found to be statistically insignificant. Energy consumption was also found to produce an insignificant positive impact on CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions in the long run. In the short run, economic growth exerts a significant positive effect on methane emissions; however, its effect on CO2 and nitrous oxide emissions although positive was found to be statistically insignificant. Energy consumption produces an insignificant impact on all components of greenhouse gasses in the short run. In addition, our empirical results showed the presence of a non-linear relationship between methane emissions and economic growth, confirming the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) only in the case of methane emissions model.

Africa continues to endure the negative effects of climate change, which have become increasingly visible in the agricultural sector, posing challenges to policies aimed at price stability and economic growth. Thus, this study applies the Structural Auto-regression (SVAR) model to estimate the impact of climate change on output and inflation in Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa using monthly data from 2002M01 to 2020M12. The findings reveal that a rise in climate change reduces the real output from its potential level and causes increases in food as well as general consumer prices across the countries. On the one hand, South Africa and Nigeria are estimated to have the most impact. On the other hand, Egypt's real output, food and consumer price inflation are estimated to have the least. Overall, the estimates show that climate change has the greatest impact on food price inflation, followed by general consumer price inflation, and finally real output. One key policy implication of this study's findings is that effective emission reductions that lowers climate change can boost economic growth while also reining in food and consumer price inflation. Thus, suggesting that bringing down climate change significantly can help central banks achieve price and output stability.

Purpose: This study examines the effect of public debt on the economic growth of OECD countries by disentangling the effect into permanent and transitory components. The study covers 37 OECD countries.Design/methodology/approach: The Mundlak decomposition was employed to decompose the effect of public debt into its transitory and permanent effect on economic growth. To account for potential endogeneity problem, the Hausman and Taylor estimator was employed to estimate the decomposed model. Further, the study disaggregated the OECD model into country group models for further analysis of the dynamics of the relationship between the variables.Findings: The findings of the study reveal that in the full OECD model public debt exerts a significant negative permanent and positive transitory effect on economic growth. This was robust to alternative model specifications. The magnitude of the negative permanent effect of debt was found to be larger than the positive transitory effect. Further, the estimates of the disaggregated models reveal that though public debt has a negative permanent effect across all the country groups, it was not the case for the transitory effect of debt. Also, a net public debt model was estimated, and its effect on public debt was found to be largely insignificant, exhibiting a Ricardian-like behaviour.Originality/value: To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study, particularly in the OECD context that employed the Mundlak transformation to examine the permanent versus transitory effect of public debt on economic growth.