Economic Growth, Energy Consumption and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Romania: An Ardl Assessment of the Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, originally introduced by Grossman and Krueger in 1991, proposes an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and environmental degradation, suggesting that environmental pressure tend to worse in early stages of development before gradually improving as income level rise. The multidisciplinary nature of EKC research integrates environmental economics, energy studies, sustainability science and econometrics methodology, focusing on the relations between economic development and environmental degradation. At the same time, EKC research has emerged as a globally interconnected scientific field, supported by academic contributions from both developed and emerging economies. This reflects the worldwide relevance of the issue of harmonizing economic growth with the imperatives of ecological sustainability and highlights the increasingly important role of international partnerships in advancing environmental economics research. This study investigates the long-run and short-run relationships between economic growth, energy consumption, and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in Romania over the period 1990–2023 by employing the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. The empirical findings reveal a stable long-run relationship in which energy consumption is the main driver of CO₂ emissions, while no robust evidence is found to support either the conventional or the N-shaped Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis.