Empirical Analysis of The EKC Hypothesis for Sulfur Dioxide Emissions in Selected Middle East and North African Countries

Studying the impact of economic growth on the environment in the context of developing countries has become of increasing economic importance in recent years. Alarming international reports showed that pollutants emissions are growing at their highest level ever, particularly in the South. This study implements recent bootstrap panel unit root tests and cointegration techniques to investigate the relationship between Sulfur dioxide emissions and real GDP for 12 MENA countries over the period 1981–2005. Our investigations lead to the result that no evidence is found for the EKC for 10 country of the region. However EKC is valid for the case of Egypt and Tunisia which are the most industrialised and diversified economies in our sample. At the same time our finding showed that EKC is not valid for the region when token as a whole.