Can Black Africa afford to be Green Africa?

The purpose of this paper is to use a neoclassical factor pricing approach to carbon emissions, and consider whether the productivity of carbon emissions differs in Sub-Saharan Africa relative to the rest of the world.

Allowing for possible cross-country dependency and correlation in the effects of the factors of production on the level of gross domestic product per capita, the authors estimate the parameters of a cross-country net production function with carbon emissions as an input.

While there is a “Sub-Saharan Africa effect” whereby carbon emissions are less productive as an input relative to the rest of the world; practically it is equally productive relative to all other countries suggesting a unfavorable distributional impact if Sub-Saharan Africa were to implement carbon emissions reductions consistent with the Kyoto Protocol.

If global warming is not anthropogenic or caused by carbon emissions, the parameter estimates do not inform an optimal and equitable carbon emissions policy based upon Sub-Saharan Africans reducing their short-run living standards.

Fair and equitable global carbon emissions policies should aim to treat Sub-Saharan African countries in proportion to their carbon emissions, and not unfairly impose emissions constraints on them equal to that of countries in the industrialized west.

As Sub-Saharan Africa has a disproportionate number of individuals in the world living on less than one dollar a day, the results suggest “Black Africa” may not be able to afford being a “Green Africa.”

The results are the first to quantify the effects of carbon emissions restrictions on output and their distributional implications for Sub-Saharan Africa.