Dynamics of Energy Consumption, Economic Growth and Carbon Emission in a Sub-national Economy Context of India: An Evidence from Kerala

On examining the relationship of energy consumption with economic growth and carbon emission, we provide the evidence that the petroleum consumption growth significantly contributes to GSDP growth of Kerala (as indicated from regression coefficient of 0.70%), whereas electricity consumption growth affects GSDP growth with a time lag (as evidenced from Granger causality and regression coefficient of .13%). In contrast, GSDP growth of the state drives up both electricity and petroleum consumption demand, along with an observed strong elasticity of substitution relationship between consumption of two energy components (coefficients varying from 30% to 66%). We further find that the growth of transportation sector activities measured from transportation output which significantly contributes to gross emissions (as reflected from regression coefficient of .32%) rather than the overall GSDP growth of the state, suggesting that the demand for petroleum product increases with increased income growth without regard for its environmental concerns over the long-run. This is occurring more especially when amounts of CO2 emission are very much lesser in the state as compared to the national average of all the states in India. Received: 19 November 2024 | Revised: 30 April 2025 | Accepted: 23 July 2025 Conflicts of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work. Data Availability Statement Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study. Author Contribution Statement Hrushikesh Mallick: Conceptualization, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision, project administration. Pulikottile Louis Beena: Conceptualization, Supervision, Project administration. Ritika Jain: Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Visualization, Supervision. Sanjib Pohit: Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Data curation, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing, Visualization, Supervision. Chetana Chaudhuri: Methodology, Software, Supervision.