Globalization, electricity consumption and ecological footprint: An autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) approach

In light of the growing need for countries to stay within their ecological limits, this paper examines how the current wave of globalization and electricity consumption drive human demands on ecological resources for Ghana from 1971-2016. Having accounted for structural breaks, the evidence from the Autoregressive Distributive Lag bound test shows that there is a long-run association between the variables. The results reveal that globalization positively and significantly stimulates the ecological footprint. More specifically, economic and social globalization inspire the ecological footprint whiles political globalization improves the environmental sustainability by exerting a reducing effect on the ecological footprint. We further demonstrate that electricity consumption particularly from fossil-fuel based energy source deteriorates the environmental quality. Moreover, economic growth and urbanization contribute to environmental degradation. Furthermore, the causality results disclose the feedback hypothesis between ecological footprint and electricity consumption and a one-way causal relationship running from globalization to ecological footprint. Some policy insights are elucidated premised on the evidence presented.