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This study examines the effects of economic growth on the carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of a sample of four countries of the Congo Basin. Cointegration tests by the distributed lags or AutoRegressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) developed by Pesaran et al. (1997, 2001) is applied to data on Cameroon, Congo, Gabon and the Democratic Republic of Congo for the period from 1978 to 2012 and indicates the existence of a long term relationship between the variables. The results show that the economic growth has a positive impact on CO2 emissions in these countries. Also, the consumption of energy, population density and industrial activities increase CO2 emissions significantly in these countries, while the commercial opening does not have a significant impact.

This paper investigates the effects of economic growth, electricity consumption and urbanization on CO2 emissions in Cameroon applying the newly developed ARDL to time series data from 1971 to 2011. In addition, we used a Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) in order to examine the long and short runs causality between CO2 emissions and others variables. The results obtained suggest that CO2 emissions are positively related to economic growth, electricity consumption and urbanization. Besides, the results suggest that there exist two forms of long run unidirectional causality when CO2 emissions and electricity consumption are dependent variables. We also found that in the short run, there is bidirectional causality between CO2 emissions and electricity consumption. Although Cameroon is not a major contributor to global carbon emissions, it should participate in the global effort of mitigation.