Industrial development, urbanization and pollution nexus in Africa

This study evaluates the relationship between industrial development, urbanization and pollution emission in Africa. The IPAT identity was used to examine the impact of industrial development and urbanization on pollution emissions. The validity of the existence of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) and the Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH) was also tested by comparing the econometric results of panel Pool Mean Group (PMG)-based autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) for the period 1990-2019. The PMG results confirm the validity of the EKC and PHH in the countries under study in the long run when the entire panel was estimated. One of the major contributions of the study is to analyze the impact of urbanization and industrialization on carbon emissions. The results show that an increase in urbanization and industrialization leads to an increase in environmental degradation for the entire panel. This paper presents significant contributions to economic policy, showing that an association exists between industrial development, urbanization and pollution emission in Africa.