Effect of Energy Consumption on Human Development in the Countries of the Economic and Monetary Community of Central Africa (EMCCA)

The purpose of this article is to analyze the effects of energy consumption on human development in the EMCCA over the period from 1990 to 2019. An econometric analysis using panel data and particularly the Driscoll-Kraay technique has shown that in EMCCA countries, energy consumption is a factor that improves human development, while renewable energy consumption has a marginal effect on human development. These results imply, on the one hand, the improvement of energy levels in key development sectors and rural areas and, on the other hand, the development of the clean energy sector.


Introduction
Human development inequalities remain a major concern for the world, and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) dedicates a global, regional or even national report to it each year. For the UNDP (2019), inequalities in human development are influenced by basic capabilities (deprivation of essential needs) and advanced capabilities (the actions of humans in society). Indeed, regarding the deprivation of needs, the UNDP (2015) acknowledged that energy deprivation is one of the obstacles to achieving the SDGs by 2030. With regard to human action in society, the COPs (15, 19 and 21) highlighted the link between energy and the environment. We notice that regardless of the type of capability, Theoretical Economics Letters energy plays a crucial role in its reduction.
For Karekezi et al. (2012), inaccessibility to basic energy services contributes to keeping poor people in a vicious cycle of poverty and thus hinders human development. This view is also supported by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD, 2017). For this institution, access to energy services in general and modern energy services, in particular, is essential for poverty eradication, economic growth, job creation, social services and, in general, the promotion of human development. Concerns about the link between energy use and human development are apparent in both the evidence and the literature.
On a factual level, it is worth mentioning that human development, as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI), stood at 0.707 in the world and 0.507 in Sub-Saharan Africa in 2018, with this subregion, ranked last in the world. With regard to the EMCCA, the UNDP report (2019) shows that the HDI level slightly increased in EMCCA countries from 1990 to 2000 and 2018, with averages of 0.520, 0.503, and 0.591, respectively. Indeed, in 2019, Gabon was the highest-ranked country, followed by Congo and Cameroon, with respective ranks of 119, 149, and 153 out of 189 countries. During the same period, energy consumption in CEMAC countries, which is captured by final consumption and the consumption of renewable energy, was at levels of approximately 125,591 koe for total energy consumption and 73,728 koe for renewable energy. This makes the EMCCA the subregion with the lowest level of energy consumption, despite the high potential it holds. These facts show that the EMCCA has both a low level of energy consumption and a low level of human development, which makes it a particularly interesting area for research to analyze the effects of energy consumption on human development.
In terms of the economic literature, the work on the relationship between energy consumption and human development is moving in two directions. In the first direction, there is a controversy between, on the one hand, the orthodox view (Solow, 1956;Becker et al., 1990;Sen, 1999;Sinha & Sen, 2016;Menegaki, 2011), which does not acknowledge the contribution of energy to development and thus to human development and, on the other hand, the heterodox review (Hansen & Percebois, 2010;Kané, 2009;Jumbe, 2004), according to which energy influences human development. In the second direction, we find the proponents of energy transition theory (Hosier & Dowd, 1987;Wang et al., 2020;Wang et al., 2018;Pirlogea, 2012). For the latter, the relationship between energy consumption and human development depends on the quantity and quality of energy. Therefore, the more developed a country is (high human development), the less it consumes fossil or unsuitable energy.
These controversies in the literature show that the relationship between energy consumption and human development is still relevant, thus justifying this research. Thus, the central question that structures the problem of this research is as follows: what are the effects of energy consumption on human development? H. C. Lekana, C. B. S. Ikiemi DOI: 10.4236/tel.2021.113027 406 Theoretical Economics Letters The objective of this paper is to analyze the effects of energy consumption on human development. Considering that energy consumption contributes to the improvement of income, which favors access to health and education, it is argued in this paper that energy consumption is beneficial for human development. The rest of this work is presented as follows. The second section is devoted to a literature review on the relationship between energy consumption and human development. The third section is devoted to the methodology. The fourth section is devoted to the presentation and interpretation of the results, and finally, the fifth section addresses the conclusion and the economic policy implications.

Review of the Literature on the Relationship between Energy Consumption and Human Development
Since the work of Kraft and Kraft (1978), the contribution of energy consumption in the economic sphere has been of constant concern to economists, and there is an abundant body of literature on the effects of energy consumption on human development. The latter is the subject of this section, in which we first address the theoretical review and then the empirical review.

Effects of Energy Consumption on Human Development in the Theoretical Literature
The literature on the relationship between energy consumption and human development is moving in two directions. First, there are two controversial approaches, namely, the orthodox approach and the heterodox approach. In the orthodox approach, which is based on growth theories (traditional and endogenous) and the theory of human development developed by Sen (1992Sen ( , 1999, energy consumption is not a primary factor for growth and human development. In other words, human development depends not on energy consumption but on other economic and noneconomic factors. Thus, to support their arguments, scholars use two hypotheses: conservation and neutrality. The first hypothesis suggests that energy consumption is a crucial component of economic growth, whether direct or indirect, and that energy is a complement to capital and labor in the production function (Apergis & Payne, 2009). The second is that energy consumption has no economic impact on growth. This assumption holds when there is no evidence of causality between energy consumption and economic growth. Thus, energy conservation policy has no effect on real GDP or economic growth (George & Nickoloas, 2011).
In contrast, the heterodox approach is based on the environmentalist or ecological vision. For the proponents of this approach (Georgescu-Roegen, 1979;Stern, 2012), energy is an indispensable, even primary, factor for economic growth and hence human development. To support this point of view, these authors put forward two hypotheses. The first is the so-called growth hypothesis, which suggests that energy consumption is an important component of economic  (Belke et al., 2010).
Energy transition theory incorporates the second direction of analysis of the relationship between energy consumption and human development. This theory builds on the work of Hosier and Dowd (1987) and Leach (1992), who posited that as income increases, energy consumers tend to transition from traditional or inferior energy to modern energy due to ease of use and comfort. Thus, Chiroleu-Assouline (2001) maintained that the energy transition has a double dividend. First, it reduces the consumption of fossil fuels, which improves the health of populations. Second, it increases the purchasing power of populations due to energy bill decreases. This double dividend is beneficial for human development in terms of improvements in income, health and education.

Effects of Energy Consumption on Human Development in the Empirical Literature
Empirically, the relationship between energy consumption and human development can be divided into two groups. On the one hand, some work emphasizes the existence of a positive link between energy consumption and human development, and on the other hand, some research aims to qualify this positive link.
With regard to the works that put forward the existence of a positive link, it is worth noting that the first studies were limited to establishing the correlations between energy consumption and human development. To this end, Pasternak (2000) studied the relationship between the HDI and energy and electricity consumption using 1997 data. He found that the HDI and energy consumption per capita are strongly positively correlated and identified an electricity threshold for a maximum HDI; in other words, energy consumption and HDI have the same behavior. When energy consumption increases (decreases), the HDI also increases (decreases). Using the same approach, Martınez and Ebenhack (2008) studied the correlation between the HDI and energy consumption per capita for one hundred and twenty (120) nations. They found similar behavior between the index values and energy for the majority of countries in the world. During the same period, Kanagawa and Nakata (2008), using a bottom-up equilibrium model, found that access to electricity improves socioeconomic conditions in rural areas of developing countries. They also showed that electricity consumption has a positive and significant correlation with GDP as well as with the HDI for one hundred and twenty (120) developing countries.
The second wave of work is based on econometric analysis of the relationship between energy consumption and human development. In this regard, Pirlogea Regarding work qualifying the existence of a positive link, Ouedraogo (2013) focused on the analysis of the relationship between energy consumption and electricity consumption and the HDI in fifteen developing countries over the period from 1988 to 2008. The short-term results showed that energy and electricity consumption have a neutral effect on the HDI, while in the long run, the results clearly confirm the existence of a negative cointegration relationship between energy consumption and the HDI. Similarly, Niu et al. (2013) examined the causality between electricity consumption and the level of human development, in which life expectancy at birth, the urbanization rate, the adult literacy rate, consumption and GDP per capita were used as development indicators.
The authors used several techniques (cointegration, panel causality and panel fixed effects models) and analyzed fifty (50) developed and developing countries.
Their results did not confirm the existence of a short-term causal relationship between the five indicators and electricity consumption. Considering the long term, the bidirectional relationship was verified for some countries.
Furthermore, Wang et al. (2018)  As a result of the above, the present study will use the same variables mentioned above to conduct an experiment in the EMCCA countries in order to contribute to the literature on this issue.

Methodology
The objective of this paper is to analyze the effects of energy consumption on human development. To achieve this, we have drawn on the work of Pirlogea (2012), Ouedraogo (2013) and Wang et al. (2020). According to these authors, human development depends on several factors, among which we can integrate energy. Thus, the formalization is as follows: where H is human development, E is energy consumption and X refers to the other variables that can explain human development. i and t correspond respectively to the number of countries and the period.
For Wang et al. (2018) and Nguyen et al. (2019), several factors (investment, environment, debt, price, and human capital), but not energy, can explain human development. Therefore, the variable X becomes: Incorporating (2) into (1), we obtain: Assuming that function (3) is a semilogarithmic function and inserting the Neperian logarithm operator to linearize, Equation (3) Considering that Equation (4) can be estimated with total energy consumption and renewable energy consumption, we obtain Equations (5) and (6)

Data Source
The data used in this paper are taken from the World Bank's World Develop-

Presentation and Discussion of Results
The macro nature of this panel leads us to use the same approach as for studies using time series. Consequently, this approach begins with a study of the dynamic properties of the series before checking whether they are cointegrated. As a result, this analysis begins with stationarity tests and continues with a study of the integration relationship between the different series in order to avoid spurious regressions (Lékana & Ndinga, 2020). Thus, we first describe the execution of the model and present the results, and then we interpret these results. Before discussing these tests, we first present the descriptive statistics and finally a correlation analysis of the EMCCA zone.

Stationarity Tests
The quest for unit roots in panel data has evolved dramatically in a short time.
In this study, we perform two unit root tests. The first-generation tests are the test of Levin, Lin and Chu (2002), in which the autoregressive root is assumed to be homogeneous under the alternative hypothesis, and the test of Im, Pesaran and Shin (2003), in which the autoregressive root is assumed to be heterogeneous under the alternative hypothesis. The results of the stationarity tests are presented in Table 3 below. The

Panel Cointegration Test
The regression of one of these variables on the others could lead to spurious re-    Tables 4-6 below.
The reading of the Kao test table shows that out of the five statistics that it contains, only two (Modified Dickey-Fuller t and Unadjusted modified Dickey-Fuller t) present significant probabilities at the 5% threshold in both models.
Faced with these results, we can conclude that the variables are cointegrated.
In Table 5, we also find two significant statistics (Modified variance ratio and Modified Phillips-Perron t) out of the seven in the Pedroni test for the renewable energy consumption model. For the total energy consumption model, we notice that all the statistics are significant at the 1% threshold. Similar to the results for the previous test, we conclude that there is a cointegration relationship.
The results of the Westerlund test presented in the table above show that in both conditions, "P and G" are significant at the 1% and 5% levels, thus confirming the results of the Kao and Pedroni tests.

Estimation Method
The three EMCCA countries are all oil producers and have the same financial regulations. Thus, they may experience common shocks, such as the oil crises of the 1970s or the global financial crisis starting in 2007. This type of correlation may result from common global shocks with heterogeneous impacts. It can also be the result of local spillovers between countries or regions. In these situations, the appropriate method is Driscoll-Kraay (Driscoll & Kraay, 1998 (Ozokcu & Özdemi, 2017;Sarkodie & Strezov, 2019). According to Hoechle (2007), erroneously ignoring spatial correlation in panel regressions typically leads to overly optimistic estimates. Table 7 below presents the results from the DK method and the fixed effect model: The reading of Table 7 shows that the models present coefficients of determination higher than 50%. We note that the Pearsan tests are also significant, which validates the use of the Driscoll & Kraay (1998) technique. In view of this information, we can conclude that the estimates are convincing. It is also important to note the absence of carry-over effects on the coefficients.
The analysis of the results shows that total external debt and inflation have a negative effect on the HDI and that only total external debt is significant at the We note that the variables CO 2 emissions, renewable energy consumption and inflation are not statistically significant. On the other hand, the variables human capital, GFCF and inward foreign direct investment are positive and significant at the 1% and 5% thresholds. Thus, a 1% increase in these variables leads to an improvement in the level of human development of 0.0017%, 0.001% and 0.0015% respectively In view of these results, we can draw two major conclusions.
Renewable energy consumption: a marginal factor in improving human development.
Reading the results shows that renewable energy consumption has a positive sign but is not significant. This result corroborates the work of Tran et al. (2019), who found that energy consumption does not influence human development.
Economically, this is explained by the orthodox approach, which holds that energy consumption has neutral effects on development, specifically human development (Jaruwan et al., 2006;Ongono, 2009).
This result can be explained in the EMCCA countries by the embryonic nature of renewable energy. Indeed, EMCCA countries have infrastructures that remain largely insufficient, which leads to a gap between supply and demand that is constantly widening. In the EMCCA, the gap between supply and demand is 190 to 270 MW, more than twice the total installed capacity of Congo. The rate of access to electricity is very low in the EMCCA, at 15%. Thus, within the zone, Gabon (70%) stands out clearly from Cameroon (22%), CAR (2%) and Chad (1%). Thus, access to electricity remains an urban phenomenon, i.e., limited to large cities and, to a lesser extent, to small towns and villages. For example, in Cameroon and Congo, only 14% of the rural population on average has access to the grid, compared to 40% and 25% of the urban population, respectively.
The costs of electricity production, and therefore consumer prices, are among the most expensive in the world and weigh heavily on the public finances of governments (thermal power plants and diesel generators), on the balance sheet of companies (self-production, based in particular on expensive generators) and on the wallets of households (energy absorbs approximately 10% of income according to the World Bank). Thus, to compensate for the shortfall in clean energy, households resort to other forms of so-called nonrenewable energy.
Total energy consumption: a factor in improving human development in the EMCCA countries.
The table of estimation results shows that total energy consumption has a positive and significant effect at the 1% threshold on human development. Thus, a 1% increase in energy consumption leads to a 0.0002% increase in the level of human development. These results contradict the work of Ouedraogo (2013), who showed that energy consumption has a negative effect on human develop- In the EMCCA countries, an increase in energy consumption leads to an improvement in the standard of living. This fact can be explained by the strong potential of the subregion in terms of energy and the role that energy consumption plays in the lives of inhabitants. Indeed, Central Africa, and particularly the EMCCA, has significant potential in terms of fossil fuels, i.e., 15% of the continent's reserves, and biomass, with the second largest forest in the world. This potential stimulates the population to resort more to this type of energy than to renewable energies, whose costs in terms of accessibility or infrastructures are still reflective of the early stage of development in some countries.
Regarding the role of energy consumption in people's lives, energy services are indispensable for domestic and productive uses. At the household level, biomass and fossil fuels facilitate cooking and are used as a source of lighting, which has an influence on the level of education and health of these households.
At the social level, fossil fuels are considered in these countries to be the main fuels. Thus, they provide services to more people and are also used as a resource alternative to clean and/or renewable energy. At the productive level, biomass represents nearly 60 million resources according to the White Paper report (ECCAS-EMCCA, 2014). We also note that fossil energies such as oil represent nearly 50 to 65% of the budgets of countries holding this resource. As a result, energy contributes to improving one of the components of the HDI, which is income. Therefore, we can conclude that energy consumption is an indispensable factor for human development.

Conclusion and Policy Implications
The purpose of this paper was to analyze the effects of energy consumption on human development. The analysis carried out via panel data econometrics and following the Driscoll & Kraay (1998) technique has allowed us to draw two lessons in the context of these countries. The first is that renewable energy consumption is a marginal factor in improving human development, and the second is that total energy consumption is a factor in improving human development.
In conclusion, the hypothesis of this paper can be rejected.
As a result, two policy implications have been identified. The first is to improve the level of energy in key development sectors (health, education, agriculture and industry) and in rural areas. To achieve this, energy must be made available to all. Governments must improve basic infrastructure and reduce the cost of energy by lowering the price of clean energy to avoid environmental degradation through the exploitation of more polluting sources.
The second implication is the development of the clean energy sector. Since investments in the energy sector are enormous, EMCCA governments must join forces to achieve levels of investment capable of meeting expectations. In fact, Theoretical Economics Letters for several years now, the EMCCA and ECCAS governments have set themselves the objective of reaching an energy balance by 2025. Increased energy consumption, particularly of fossil fuels, has social and environmental consequences and costs at the local and regional levels. Thus, it would be interesting in future research to address the relationship between energy consumption and environmental degradation.