Assessing the moderating effect of institutional quality on economic growth-carbon emission nexus in Nigeria.

This study explores the relationship between economic growth and carbon dioxide and the moderating effect of institutional quality in Nigeria from 1990 to 2020, by employing long-run and short-run dynamic ARDL regression, quartile regression and Granger causality test for the estimation. Utilizing CO per capita emissions; GDP per capita, a proxy for economic growth; capital stock (CAPSTK), proxy for capital investment in Nigeria and control of corruption and regulatory quality (COC and RGQ) which represent the effective environmental regulations and laws put in place for the control and prevention of environmental degradation, the study found a significant cointegration between CO emissions and economic growth (lnGDP) in Nigeria. Furthermore, an N-shaped nexus exists between CO emissions and economic growth in the long-run and short-run instead of the inverted U-shape curve postulated by the EKC hypothesis.