Investigation Asymmetric Relationship between Urbanization and Carbon Dioxide Emissions in Iran

The growth of urbanization has been the most important feature of socio-economic developments of the last two centuries in different countries of the world. urbanization process is the kind of moving population and workforce from rural areas to urban areas. it's mainly including farmers entering cities and their employment in the industry sector as well as service jobs related to it. nowadays, environmental degradation and pollution is one of the most important issues in countries. urbanization as a part of the growth process in third world countries, despite advantages, creates social and environmental costs such as high energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. so, the purpose of this study is to investigate the asymmetric relationship between urbanization and carbon dioxide emissions in iran during 1970-2018. for this purpose, the required information is collected from the central bank of iran and the world bank. in order to analyze data, non-linear autoregressive distributed lag (nardl) is used. the results show that the relationship between urbanization growth rate and carbon dioxide emissions in iran is asymmetric; i.e., increase and decrease of the growth rate of urbanization have a different effect on carbon dioxide emissions. so, increase of the growth rate of urbanization significantly reduces carbon dioxide emissions, but decrease of the growth rate of urbanization does not have a significant effect on emissions of such a greenhouse gas. also, the effect of per capita gdp is non-significant and the effect of per capita variables of factory production, export and population ratio between 15-64 years on carbon dioxide emissions are positive and significant.