Cement production, environmental pollution, and economic growth: evidence from China and USA

The study focuses on the nonlinear Granger causality between cement production, economic growth and carbon dioxide emissions by Markov-switching vector autoregressive (MScVAR) and Markov-switching Granger causality approach for the period of 1960-2017 for China and the USA. The empirical findings from MSIA(2)-VAR(2) for the USA and MSIA(3)-VAR(3) for China suggest that cement production has an important impact on CO2 emissions and economic growth. Markov-switching causality approach determines the evidence of unidirectional causality running from cement production to carbon dioxide emissions in all regimes for the USA and China. The cement production is an important source of environmental pollution. The USA and China have global responsibility for cement production determined as one of the central sources of carbon dioxide emissions. Moreover, MS-Granger causality results were compared with ones determined by traditional causality method. It was determined that to employ traditional method instead of MS-causality method can cause wrong policy applications if the tested series has nonlinearity. [GRAPHICS] .