Analyzing the Relationship between Environmental Pollution, Electricity Consumption, and Economic Growth in Ghana: ARDL Approach

The research investigated the nexus among environmental pollution, electricity consumption, productivity, and economic growth in Ghana embarking on time series data spanning from 1985 to 2020 adopting ARDL- autoregressive distributed lag co integration techniques. When economic growth (RGDP) was utilized as the dependent variable, the study discovered a cointegrating nexus among the variables such as electricity usage, carbon emissions, and gross capital formation which denotes the independent variables. The bounds test results revealed that electricity consumption exerted a positive and statistically significant effect on economic growth both in the short-run and long-run suggesting that higher electricity consumption is crucial to economic growth in Ghana. The Granger causality outcome also demonstrated a unidirectional correlation flowing from economic growth to energy usage, demonstrating overall electricity conservation policies are feasible solutions for Ghana. The Ghanaian government can accomplish its aim of optimum productivity expansion with minimal carbon emissions by developing a substitute for coal energy that can offer to heat to the economic sectors. According to the research, energy usage such as gas is beneficial to environmental quality since it produces fewer emissions than some other renewable resources. Keywords: ARDL, Electricity Consumption, Carbon Emissions (CO2), Economic Growth