Energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions and economic development: Evaluating alternative and plausible environmental hypothesis for sustainable growth

Pursuit of excellence in economic development, in the midst of damaging the natural environment, is a shameless growth. The economic impacts on environmental degradation are quite visible in industrialized economies where human health is compromised by rapid economic growth and energy induced emissions. This study examines the interrelationship between energy consumption, economic growth and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions under the six alternative and plausible hypothesis including Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), Pollution Haven Hypothesis (PHH), population based emissions (IPAT), energy led emissions, sectoral growth emissions and Emissions emancipated Human Development Index (eHDI) in the context of low and middle income countries, high income countries and in aggregated panel, over the period of 1975-2015. The results supported the EKC hypothesis, IPAT hypothesis, energy induced emissions, and sectoral growth emissions in different regions of the world, while PHH and eHDI hypothesis does not confirm across regions. This study exclusively determines the key socio-economic and environmental problems in a large pool of the world economies to understand the need of development policy agenda for sustainable growth.