This study examines whether increasing access to electricity raises per capita carbon dioxide emissions in Africa and how this relationship varies across the emissions distribution. Using a country-level annual panel dataset for 53 African countries from 2007 to 2020, we employ the Novel Method of Moments Quantile Regression (MMQR) to account for cross-country heterogeneity, non-normality, and distributional differences. Our results show that access to electricity raises emissions at all quantiles. The effect is considerably stronger in countries with higher emissions. This convex pattern indicates that electrification based on fossil fuels generates disproportionate environmental impacts in more carbon-intensive countries. Granger non-causality test has been applied to observe predictive precedence from electricity access to emissions, the broader results identify a robust and statistically meaningful predictive precedence. Since Granger non-causality does not directly refer to structural causality, Panel Fourier Toda-Yamamoto test has been applied and it confirms structural causation from access to electricity to per capita CO 2 emission. The robustness of these findings is confirmed using 21 alternative estimators. These results highlight an important policy challenge: Africa’s progress toward expanding electricity access under the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7 may conflict with emissions-reduction commitments under SDG 13 unless clean energy investments scale rapidly. Thus, this study provides new continent-wide, distribution-sensitive evidence to guide policymakers and development partners in aligning electrification strategies with low-carbon transitions.
Banerjee et al. (Fri,) studied this question.