Do the Impacts of Bad Governance Influence Carbon Dioxide Emissions in African Countries at Different Income Levels?

Abstract

Few studies actually investigated the impacts of bad governance (corruption) on carbon dioxide emissions in Africa at different income levels with population age structure and other driver-triggers playing moderating roles. This study uses a unique observation collected from the World Bank (2013) of 51 African sovereign countries to ask directly, what is the net impact of corruption on CO2 emissions, and to assess the relevance of a range of potential reasons for why the net impacts of corruption on CO2 emissions across African countries and see how this impacts varies per capita income, for the period 1960-2012. The study employs a panel dataset and used generalised least squares estimator to determine the net impacts of corruption on CO2 emissions (environmental impacts). The findings suggest that the average effect of corruption perception index over CO2 emissions, when the corruption perception index changes across time and between countries increases by 1%, CO2 emissions decreases by about 0.73%, 1.95% for low-income-countries-in-Africa and upper-income-countries-in-Africa respectively, when all other predictors are constant. The negative impacts created by the practice of corruption were found to be an important consideration for future researchers and as a vital factor in the determination of the driving forces of environmental impacts neglected by previous study.