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This paper aims to examine the short- and long-run relationship between electricity consumption and economic growth.

The study uses a panel-based autoregressive distributed lag approach to cointegration to investigate this relationship in 12 advanced, emerging markets and developing economies during the period 1970-2016, selected from three continents, namely, Europe (Luxemborg, Norway, Denmark and Belgium), Asia (Singapore, Japan, Indonesia and India) and Africa (South Africa, Algeria, Egypt and Kenya).

Based on the homogeneity assumption, the study results reveal that electricity consumption is positively and significantly associated with economic growth in all the study countries in the long run. Conversely, the short-run results reveal that electricity consumption is positively and significantly associated with economic growth in ten countries and negatively associated with economic growth in only two countries.

The study concludes that, on the whole, electricity consumption is an important factor of production in the majority of the study countries. Therefore, policymakers should focus on growth-enhancing energy policies that promote energy efficiency usage, especially in the long run.

The authors hereby confirm that the paper has not been published elsewhere, and this research is entirely their work.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the causal relationship between the copper price dynamics and economic growth in Zambia over the period from 1995 to 2015.

The study uses a data set assembled from five difference sources: the heritage foundation; the London metal exchange index; the Penn World Tables version 9.0; the total economy database; and the World Bank Development Indicators. The paper employs the Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) approach as the estimation technique.

The estimates demonstrate that there exists a positive and significant relationship between movements in copper prices and economic growth in Zambia. The study draws policy implications from these findings.

This study is limited to the period from 1995 to 2015, this is due to lack of data on the country’s institutional indicators, trade openness and the real exchange rate.

There have been calls to diversify the economy of Zambia due to the recurring chaotic events, which are often induced by over-dependence on copper exports. Thus, the study findings will be useful to academia, policy makers and stakeholders with vested interest in the economy of Zambia.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first empirical study to investigate the causal relationship that exists between copper prices and economic growth in Zambia. The existing empirical studies in the domain have devoted their attention on establishing the relationship between commodity price movements and exchange rates in Zambia.