Spillover effect of greenhouse gas emissions across five major continents

There are some studies that either examine the convergence or spillover effect of greenhouse gas emissions (GHGEs) at the country or multiple country level but research on the spillover effect of GHGEs is very limited particularly for the agriculture sector across the major continents. Therefore, this study examined the connectedness across the five major continents namely Asia, Africa, Europe, Oceania and Americas for the period 1961–2018. To achieve the objective, this study applies a very recent time-varying parameter vector autoregressive (TVP-VAR) model. The results obtained from TVP-VAR model indicate that all the five continents are highly interconnected in GHGEs. In particular, the findings show that Asia, Africa and Americas are the main transmitters and Europe and Oceania are the main receivers of GHGEs. The findings suggest that Asia, Africa and Americas should use the economic profits received from the economic integration for the environmental protection policies with more attention. This might help for high economic growth and development with a clean environment.