Empirical Analysis of the Environmental Kuznets Curve for Co2 Emissions in Nigeria: The Role of Industrialization and Urbanization

The proposed inverted U-type relationship between environmental degradation and per capita income under EKC hypothesis has been examined in this paper for Nigeria over the period 1970-2019. Using the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration and ECM (OLS Approach), the EKC hypothesis does not seem to hold both in short-run and long-run. The estimated coefficients of the long-run relationship shows that LOGCO2(-1) is the only statistically significant variable explaining environmental degradation while the short run results indicate that D(LOGCO2(-1)) is the most significant variable in explaining environmental degradation in Nigeria followed by D(LOGIND(-1)).