The impact of age structure on carbon emission in the Middle East: the panel autoregressive distributed lag approach

Rapid evolution in the population age structure of the Middle East countries has major economic, social, and environmental outcomes. Therefore, to fill the gap in the previous literatures, in this study, the effect of age structure on environmental degradation was investigated in the Middle East region. To achieve this goal, a panel data of 10 Middle East countries were examined over the period of 1990 to 2014. Moreover, the carbon dioxide emission per capita was used as an environmental pollution index in this study. According to the stationary property of the variables, small sample size data, and the assumptions of the model, the panel autoregressive distributed lag method of mean group, pooled mean group, and dynamic fixed effect estimators were investigated in this study. The empirical results implied that the pooled mean group model emerged as the most efficient among the three estimators. Also, results revealed that the age structure have a significant relationship with environmental pollution. Children and working age population have a positive elasticity, whereas elderly people have negative elasticity. Furthermore, the results showed that the working age population has the greatest explanatory power on the carbon emissions. Also, the relationship between per capita energy consumption and gross domestic product per capita with air pollution was positive. Overall, the empirical results showed that any attempt to decrease carbon dioxide emissions in the Middle East region should consider the population age structure.