The effect of international trade on greenhouse gas emissions:A panel data analysis

There is an increasing and urgent need for a global action in terms of pollutants. Through various conferences, agreements and protocols it became clear that the most immediate danger is coming through GHG emissions and the resulting global climate change. Taking Paris Agreement as a point of origin, this paper aims to provide a summary of the current levels of CO2 emissions and its linkage to international trade through real GDP per capita, energy consumption, trade openness, share of urban population over the period of years 1992-2014, while testing the EKC hypothesis. From the CCPI 2018 report, a panel of top 20 largest CO2 emitters are chosen over the years 1992-2014, for a detailed investigation to meet that end. The results show three of the total nine proposed models show over 70% R-squared statistics, supporting the EKC hypothesis.