Impact of agricultural land use and economic growth on nitrous oxide emissions: Evidence from developed and developing countries.

The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) establishes a hypothetical link between economic growth and environmental degradation and has been tested empirically using various measures of pollution, including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions. However, few studies have focused on N2O emissions, despite their projected lifetime of 114 years and 300 times greater warming potential than CO2. Employing panel data for the period 1980 to 2012, this study uses the EKC to investigate N2O emissions, including those resulting from agriculture, economic growth, agricultural land use, and exports. Two groups of data are extracted from the panel data: the first group contains the top 15 countries, ranked by N2O emissions, measured in thousand metric tons of CO2, while the second group contains the top 18 countries, ranked by share of agriculture in GDP. A pooled mean group approach developed by Pesaran et al. (1999) is used to determine whether long-run relationships exist between the variables after determined by the Hausman test. The results show that N2O emissions and economic growth are co-integrated in both panels, providing evidence in favour of the EKC. In addition, agricultural land use has a positive and significant effect on N2O emissions. That is, if countries wish to reduce their N2O emissions or agricultural N2O emissions, they should optimize or reduce the use of agricultural land.