مصرف انرژی های تجدید پذیر و غیر قابل تجدید، تخریب محیط زیست و رشد اقتصادی در تونس Renewable and non-renewable energy consumption, environmental degradation and economic growth in Tunisia

1 Introduction Industrial revolution and rapid economic growth in countries have resulted into day’s much discussed phenomena like global warming and climate change. The global increasing concern for environmental sustainability is visible in a public arena; the development strategy depends largely on economic growth which causes environmental degradation. In the past two decades, Kaygusuz (2009) has indicated the increase of carbon dioxide emissions is considered one of the main causes of global warming and climatic instability. The prevalence of such problems is higher in countries such as Tunisia, where economic growth, energy security and environmental sustainability are simultaneously important. On the other hand, the use of energy natural resources as inputs in the development or production process is a problem. Tunisia, as a developing country, economic growth represents an interesting case where it faces the difficulty to fulfill the needs of energy demand. Industries may increase pollution in developing countries such as Tunisia, due to the increased production of emissions intensity to export goods to developed countries. Currently, the economy of Tunisia is diverse economy, ranging from agriculture, fisheries, mining, manufacturing, textiles, and petroleum products, to tourism. Tunisia is not like some North African countries as Algeria and Libya which are mostly endowed with rich hydrocarbon resources. Tunisia is endowed with multi and excellent renewable resources. Thus, Tunisia should be more keen to invest in renewable energy generation projects to minimize spending and dependence on foreign energy sources. Therefore, analyses of economic and environmental impacts of concerned variables are needed to address this research gap and to improve the design and accept the energy renewable policy. The main objective of present study is to examine the long run and the relationship between economic growth, renewable energy consumption, energy consumption and environmental pollution measured by CO2 emissions in Tunisia during the period 1990–2015. This object is achieved by the following steps: First, stationarity and Johansen co-integration are tested; second, error-correction models are estimated to test for the Granger causality between the two variables. The rest of this article is structured as follows: After the section (1) which is the introduction, this paper includes five additional sections: section (2) is a literature review; section (3) presents the data source and methodological framework; section (4) presents the empirical results and interpretation. finally, section (5) present the conclusion and policy implications.