Abstract:
The study examines the effect of financial development, primary and secondary sectors
activities on environmental quality. The study considers three distinct objectives. First,
the study examines whether primary sector activities have positive effect on
environmental quality in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Second, it assesses whether
secondary sector activities have positive effect on environmental quality in sub-Saharan
Africa, and the third objective investigates whether there is short and long-run
bidirectional causal relationship between financial development and environmental
quality. A panel of county-level data on twenty (20) selected countries from sub-
Saharan Africa are obtained from the World Development Indicators (WDIs).
Employing the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM), Random Effect (RE), and
Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) techniques, the study finds that, one, primary
sector activities affect environmental quality in sub-Saharan countries negatively. Two,
secondary sector activities in sub-Saharan Africa have positive influence on
environmental quality. Three, financial development has no influence on environmental
quality in short and long-run in SSA. The directional causality suggests that these
variables do not have effect on each other in short and long term for countries in sub-
Saharan Africa (SSA). However, the coefficients of energy consumption, primary and
secondary sector show bidirectional causality for long-run, but primary sector shows
one way causality from primary sector to carbon emission in the short run. As a policy
recommendation, SSA countries should enact and implement policies that would
control and regulate the activities in the primary and secondary sectors, to prevent the
use of environmentally unsustainable chemicals in factories and on the earth surface to
improve the quality of the environment.
Description:
A thesis in the Department of Finance, School of Business,
submitted to School of Graduate Studies in partial fulfilment of
the requirements for the award of the degree of
Master of Philosophy
(School of Business)
in the University of Education, Winneba
AUGUST, 2023