Investigating CO2 emissions from aviation in oil producing countries using a two-stage maximum entropy approach

The transportation sector plays a major role in the rapid economic growth of developing countries. Since this sector requires large amounts of fossil energy resources, it has a very important impact on global warming and greenhouse gas emissions. As aviation has a significant contribution to carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions among different type of transportation, there is considerable interest in policies, regulations and research to mitigate the adverse effects of aviation on climate [1]. This work investigates the role of air passengers and air freight on CO2 emissions from aviation for eight oil-producing countries in the middle east for the years 2013-2019. Maximum entropy bootstrap for time series and generalized maximum entropy estimation are used in this work, which represent two powerful techniques that lead to reliable and stable results in ill-posed models. The empirical results confirm the existence of a positive impact of air passengers on CO2 emissions from air transport in all the sample countries. But the connection between air freight and CO2 emissions from aviation is only confirmed for Iran and Qatar. The findings for the other countries regarding the impact of air freight on CO2 emissions from aviation depend on the significance levels considered.