Economic growth effects on CO2 emissions in North America

This paper examines the heterogeneity in the environmental field, specifically in the emission of the main of the greenhouse gases, CO2, within the 3 countries composing the North American region. On the one hand, the United States is a large emitter of CO2 (19% of global emissions accumulated in 1990-2020), only surpassed by China as of 2005. On the other hand, Canada and Mexico are relatively small emitters on a global scale (1.8% and 1.4% of global emissions accumulated in 1990-2020, respectively), but with large economic and technological differences. Under these conditions, the objective of this research is to find differences and similarities between the three countries regarding CO2 emissions trends and their driving structural factors: scale, technological and composition effects, based on annual data from 2001 to 2014. With a structural decomposition analysis, we found that, in general, the scale effect was polluting and dominating in the period, while the technological effect was anti -polluting, in addition to a small and ambivalent composition effect (positive in some years and negative in others). It is concluded that there is a process of convergence in the intensity of emissions per GDP value and with respect to the three mentioned effects. It is also concluded that the characteristics of the three effects in Mexico were like those of the United States, while Canada approached along the analysis period.