Although the concept of ekc was not considered in the

consumption improves the quality of the environment in Africa. Although the concept of EKC
was not considered in the recent study of Alola & Sarkodie (2019), the study however
incorporated the natural resource rent among other environmental determinants for the case of
the European Union. Also, the study of Wang and Dong (2019) investigated the relationship
between ecological footprint (i.e. a more composite indicator for environmental degradation),
urbanization and economic growth for Sub-Saharan African countries over the period 1990 –
2014. The study adopted the Augmented mean group estimator and the corresponding findings
suggest that urbanization, nonrenewable energy consumption are key determinants of
environmental degradation in SSA countries. In a similar study conducted for European Union
Sixteen (EU-16) countries (Alola et al., 2019; Bekun et al., 2019), natural resources rent and
renewable energy consumption contribute to increase the quality of the environment.
Given the recent trajectory of the literature after the seminal study of Kraft and Kraft, the studies
have placed less emphasis on the outlined variables in the current study especially for the case of
African countries. Accordingly, African countries have interesting energy dynamics. All the
aforementioned variables provide far-reaching outcomes, with some studies confirming the EKC
hypothesis (Saint et al., 2019; Gokmenoglu & Taspinar 2018; Katircioglu & Katircioglu 2018;
Katircioglu et al. 2018 while a few others have failed to confirm the EKC hypothesis
(Mukhopadhyay, 2008; Dietzenbacher & Mukhopadhyay, 2007). Yet the results from the
literature are incomplete with the divergent empirical nexuses. Thus, the need to re-investigate
the theme in Africa where little or no attention has been documented is timely and pivotal to the
energy economic literature for both stakeholders and policymakers by the incorporation of
urbanization and other macroeconomic indicators in the African context.

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3. Data and Methodology
3.1 Data
This investigation employs balanced annual panel data for selected thirteen (13) African states
over the period 1980-2014. In this case, carbon dioxide (CO
2
is measured in kilotons) which is
used as a proxy for carbon emissions is the dependent variable. Also, the independent variables
employed are the gross domestic product per capita (GDPC measured in USD constant 2010),
total natural resource rent (NRT measured as percentage of GDP), urbanization (URB is the
urban population and ratio of total population), non-renewable energy consumption (NEC is
measured as kilogram oil equivalent per capita), and electricity energy consumption (ELE
measured in kilowatt per hour). The panel of selected African countries considered in this study
is restricted to Angola, Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Cot e d’Ivoire, Ethiopia,
Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zimbabwe, obviously due to data
availability. Furthermore, the variable descriptions (the classification with units, sources of the
variables), the common statistics, and the correlation properties of the aforementioned variables
are respectively illustrated in Table 1, Table 2, and Table 3.