Investigation of the Determinant of CO2 Emission in Iran (Using Environmental Kuznets curve)

The gaseous composition of the Earth's atmosphere is changing at an accelerated rate because of the influence of human activities. Different factors can cause increasing air contamination such as CO2. Understanding factors affecting atmosphere gaseous change is important for management and reducing air contaminants. The aim of this paper is to investigate factors affecting on CO2 emission in Iran, using Environmental Kuznets curve. EKC depicts long-term relationship between pollution and economic growth. It hypothesizes that during the initial stage of economic growth environmental quality will deteriorate, then, after reaching some turning point, it will improve as the economic growth. Chosen model estimated by autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach. The result indicated that, ratio of industrial value added and deviation from mean temperature are the effective factors on CO2 Emission. In addition, the sign of the coefficient suggests there is a quadratic relation between CO2 emission and per capita income. This means, there is an inverted U-shaped of EKC for CO2 emission in Iran.