Agricultural production and CO2 emissions from two sources in the ECOWAS region: New insights from quantile regression and decomposition analysis

Agriculture being the dominant economic activity of the West African economies is responsible for the most greenhouse gasses emitted in the region. Are there heterogeneous determinants of environmental degradation across low, intermediate, and high CO2 emitters in West Africa? Considering the significance of agriculture, industrial activities, renewable energy consumption and economic growth in West-Africa, this paper investigates the conditional determinants of environmental degradation from two sources (per-capita CO2 emission and CO2 emission from liquid sources) using panel data from 15 ECOWAS countries for the period 1990-2015. The study adopts a panel quantile regression technique with non-additive fixed effects as well as quintile decomposition techniques to explore if the relationship between agricultural and economic factors differs across low, intermediate, and high CO2 emitters and the extent of CO2 emission gap between Low Income Group (LIG) and Lower-Middle Income Groups (LrnIG). Results from the mean estimators show that while agricultural production impedes CO2 emissions from liquid sources, it however increases total emissions implying a shift from mechanized farming to more traditional farming methods and the burning and use of biomass from agricultural produce as an energy source. Estimates of the conditional determinants of environmental degradation vary along the quantiles signifying heterogeneity of the determinants of environmental degradation across, low, intermediate, and high CO2 emitters. Additionally, results emanating from the quantile decomposition procedure show that lower-income West African economies have superseded their lower-middle income counterparts at higher quantiles of CO2 emissions. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.