Paper Title
Energy Consumption, Economic Growth, Financial Development and Population Size Impact on Carbon Dioxide Emissions
Abstract
This paper introduces the basic principles of grey relational analysis (GRA) and then applies GRA to explore the impact of energy, economic, financial, and population factors on carbon emissions in the environment from 2004 to 2011. The results of GRA show that the energy consumption and GDP-related linkage effects are ranked first and second among the four factors.This shows that energy consumption and economic growth are closely related to carbon emissions. Generally, high economic growth requires more energy consumption and generates more environmental pollution. However, the high level of economic growth that has been praised in recent years is indeed a commitment to developing a low-carbon economy, investing in energy infrastructure, improving energy efficiency, and developing renewable energy, thus reducing carbon emissions while developing the economy. In addition, when foreign direct investment (FDI) ranks third in terms of carbon emissions, it often reveals that the country has adopted weak environmental regulations to attract foreign direct investment. Therefore, the government should strengthen environmental protection policies while attracting foreign direct investment. When the correlation effect of population size on carbon emissions is relatively low, this means that the population has little effect on carbon dioxide emissions. For a populous country, this shows that the country can use energy-related resources to develop the economy very economically. On the whole, a country with an economically rising development can adopt an environmentally-friendly financial development policy, increase energy consumption efficiency with energy-saving awareness, reduce carbon emissions, and promote green economy growth to achieve sustainable development goals.
Index Terms - Gray relational analysis, FDI, CO2 emissions, Developing countries