مصرف انرژی، قیمت ها و رشد اقتصادی در سه کشور SSA: یک مطالعه مقایسه ای

In this paper we examine the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in three sub-Saharan African countries, namely South Africa, Kenya and Congo (DRC). We incorporate prices as an intermittent variable in a bivariate setting between energy consumption and economic growth—thereby creating a simple trivariate framework. Using the ARDL-bounds testing procedure, we find that the causality between energy consumption and economic growth varies significantly across the countries under study. The results show that for South Africa and Kenya there is a unidirectional causal flow from energy consumption to economic growth. However, for Congo (DRC) it is economic growth that drives energy consumption. These findings have important policy implications insofar as energy conservation policies are concerned. In the case of Congo (DRC), for example, the implementation of energy conservation policies may not significantly affect economic growth because the country's economy is not entirely energy dependent. However, for South Africa and Kenya there is a need for more energy supply augmentations in order to cope with the long-run energy demand. In the short-run, however, the two countries should explore more efficient and cost-effective sources of energy in order to address the energy dependency problem.

The debate regarding the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth has attracted vast literature from both theoretical and empirical fronts in recent years. The thrust of this debate largely revolves around the inter-temporal causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. Four views currently exist regarding the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. The first view argues that economic growth causes energy consumption, and that as the economy grows the demand for energy from different sections of the economy increases. The second view, however, argues that it is the consumption of energy that causes economic growth. The third view argues that both electricity consumption and economic growth cause each other, i.e. that there is a bi-directional causality between electricity consumption and economic growth. While these three views support the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth, the fourth view contends that there is no causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth. In other words, both energy consumption and economic growth are neutral with respect to each other. Although a number of studies have been conducted on the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in sub-Saharan African countries, some of these studies have typically relied on the cross-sectional data, which may not satisfactorily address the country-specific issues. The problem of using a cross-sectional method is that by grouping countries that are at different stages of economic development, it fails to address the country-specific effects of energy consumption on economic growth and vice versa. In particular, the method fails to explicitly address the potential biases induced by the existence of cross-country heterogeneity, which may lead to inconsistent and misleading estimates (see Ghirmay, 2004; Quah, 1993; Casselli et al., 1996; Odhiambo, 2008 and Odhiambo, 2009a). Even where time-series data have been used, the empirical findings on the direction of causality between energy consumption and economic growth have been largely inconclusive (see Odhiambo, 2009a). The current study, therefore, attempts to examine the inter-temporal causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in three SSA countries, namely South Africa, Kenya and Congo (DRC). The three countries include two low-income economies, i.e. Kenya and Congo (DRC), and one highly developed economy, i.e. South Africa. The study uses the recently developed ARDL-bounds testing approach in a trivariate setting to examine this linkage. Specifically, the study incorporates prices in the bivariate setting between energy consumption and economic growth—thereby creating a simple trivariate model. The price level has been chosen as an intermittent variable because of its effects on both energy consumption and economic growth. On the one hand, an increase in prices (for example) is expected to lead to a decrease in energy demand, thereby leading to a decrease in energy consumption. On the other hand, an increase in prices leads to a decrease in demand, thereby leading to a contraction in aggregate output. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 gives an overview of the energy policies in the three study countries. Section 3 presents the literature review, while Section 4 deals with the empirical model specification, the estimation technique and the empirical analysis of the regression results. Section 5 concludes the study.

This study examines the causal relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in three sub-Saharan countries, namely South Africa, Kenya and the DRC. The study incorporates prices as an intermittent variable in the energy-growth nexus in order to avoid the common biases associated with the bivariate causality analysis —thereby creating a simple trivariate framework. The results show that the causality between energy consumption and economic growth varies significantly across the study countries. In the main, the results show that there is a distinct unidirectional causal flow from energy consumption to economic growth in the case of South Africa and Kenya, but a unidirectional causality from economic growth to energy consumption in the case of Congo (DRC). The results apply irrespective of whether the causality is estimated in the short-run or in the long-run. Other results show that: (i) for Kenya, there is a unidirectional causal flow from prices to economic growth and prima-facie (short-run) causal flow from energy consumption to prices; (2) for Congo (DRC) there is a distinct unidirectional causal flow from energy consumption to prices and a prima-facie (short-run) causal flow from prices to economic growth. The findings of this study have important policy implications insofar as energy conservation and efficiency policies are concerned. For example, for Congo (DRC) the implementation of energy conservation policies may not significantly affect economic growth because Congo's economy is not energy dependent. However, for South Africa and Kenya there is a need for more energy supply augmentations in order to cope with the growing energy demand. In the short-run, however, the two countries should explore more efficient and cost-effective sources of energy in order to address the energy dependency problem.