The Causal Connection between CO2 Emissions and Agricultural Productivity in Pakistan: Empirical Evidence from an Autoregressive Distributed Lag Bounds Testing Approach

The rapid agricultural development and mechanization of agronomic diligence has led to a significant growth in energy consumption and CO2 emission. Agriculture has a dominant contribution to boosting the economy of any country. In this paper, we demonstrate carbon dioxide emissions’ association with cropped area, energy use, fertilizer offtake, gross domestic product per capita, improved seed distribution, total food grains and water availability in Pakistan for the period of 1987-2017. We employed Augmented Dickey-Fuller and Phillips-Perron unit root tests to examine the variables’ stationarity. An autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing technique to cointegration was applied to demonstrate the causality linkage among study variables from the evidence of long-run and short-run analyses. The long-run evidence reveals that cropped area, energy usage, fertilizer offtake, gross domestic product per capita and water availability have a positive and significant association with carbon dioxide emissions, while the analysis results of improved seed distribution and total food grains have a negative association with carbon dioxide emissions in Pakistan. Overall, the long-run effects are stronger than the short-run dynamics, in terms of the impact of explanatory variables on carbon dioxide emission, thus making the findings heterogeneous. Possible initiatives should be taken by the government of Pakistan to improve the agriculture sector and also introduce new policies to reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide.