Economic Growth and Electricity Consumption in Africa and Asia: MS-VAR and MS-GRANGER Causality Analysis

Knowledge of the direction of the causality between electricity consumption and economic growth is of primary importance if appropriate energy policies and energy conservation measures are to be devised.This study estimates the causality relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth by Markov Switching Vector Auto Regression (VAR) and Markov Switching Granger Causality methods for some emerging countries; Brunei, Cameron, Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria, South Africa, Togo and Zimbabwe. The results from MS-VAR models show that in regime one, two and three, Electricity Consumption (EC) is the Granger cause of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and GDP is the Granger cause of the EC. In sum, we find some evidence of bidirectional GC between the EC and the GDP.