Investigating the Linkage between Economic Growth, Electricity Access, Energy Use, and Population Growth in Pakistan

Abstract

Electricity is a versatile form of energy that plays a vital role in fulfilling the daily requirements of human life. The primary aim of this study was to investigate and explore the link between economic growth, electricity access, energy use, and population growth in Pakistan for the period 1990⁻2016. An autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach to cointegration was applied to investigate the causality link between the study variables. These tests shed light on the long-run connection among the variables; further, the results revealed that the electricity access to the total population, electricity access to the urban population, energy usage, population growth, and urban population growth had a significant impact on economic growth, while the electricity access to the rural population and rural population growth had a negative impact on the economic growth in Pakistan. According to these findings, this study recommends that the government of Pakistan pay further attention to increasing its electricity production from different sources, including hydroelectric, solar, oil, and gas, and nuclear in order to fulfill the country’s demands.

Keywords

• economic growth
• electricity access
• energy production
• population growth
• ARDL