The Impact of Pandemics on Energy Consumption and Carbon Emissions

This dissertation analyses the impact of the past major pandemics and epidemics of the 21st century – SARS, H1N1, MERS, Ebola and Zika – on pollutant emissions (more specifically, carbon dioxide), separately in Low Income Countries, Emerging Market Economies and Advanced Economies. The dataset on pandemics and epidemics used was put together by Ma et al. (2020) and all other variables were retrieved from the WB’s World Bank Indicators, for the time span 1980-2020. We also studied the relation between nitrogen dioxide (NO2) emissions and the number of new weekly cases and deaths (per million) of COVID-19, using a dataset from Jalles et al. (2021). Estimations were made via Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) with time and country fixed effects and concluded that pandemic shocks lead to overall decreases in pollutant emissions.