Renewable energy, economic growth and trade openness: An empirical analysis of the Kuznets environmental curve hypothesis in Morocco

Abstract

Morocco has started few years ago the deployment of renewable energies, particularly from wind and solar sources. The aim of this article is to test the validity of the Kuznets environmental curve in Morocco and to analyze the role of production of electricity from renewable sources on the reduction of CO2 emissions. For this objective, the relation between CO2 emissions, economic growth, and other explicative variables such as renewable electricity production and trade openness for the period 1990-2017 will be investigated. Autoregressive distributed lag model empirical approach and the Granger causality test will be used to study the causality between our variables and to test the validity of the environmental Kuznets curve for the Moroccan case. In fact, only few studies have investigated the validity of the environmental Kuznets Curve in Morocco, and no study has studied the renewable energy potential in this framework. Our results suggest that there is a strong reintegration between our variables and that the economic growth can be achieved in parallel with environmental politics that seeks for CO2 emissions limitation. The role of renewable energy in the reduction of CO2 emissions had been shown. However, our result didn’t confirm the environmental Kuznets Curve for the Moroccan case.

JEL Classification: Q20, Q56, O31

Paper type: Empirical research