Drivers of Industrial and Non-Industrial Greenhouse Gas Emissions

There has been extensive analysis of the drivers of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production, which constituted only 55% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 1970 and 65% in 2010. But there has been much less analysis of the drivers of greenhouse gases in general and especially of emissions of greenhouse gases from agriculture, forestry, and other land uses, which we call non-industrial emissions in this paper, that constituted 24% of total emissions in 2010. We statistically analyse the relationship between both industrial and non-industrial greenhouse gas emissions and economic growth and other potential drivers for 129 countries over the period from 1971 to 2010. Our analysis combines the three main approaches in the literature to investigating the evolution of emissions and income. We find that economic growth is a driver of both industrial and non-industrial emissions, though growth has twice the effect on industrial emissions. Both sources of emissions decline over time though this effect is larger for non-industrial emissions. There is also convergence in emissions intensity for both types of emissions but given these other effects there is no evidence for an environmental Kuznets curve.