**1. Introduction**

In recent decades, climate change has been regarded as the most challenging environmental problem of our time and has attracted the attention of international organizations, policy makers, and researchers. In this context, this article aims to examine the relationship between economic growth, ICT, and CO2 emissions.

From a theoretical point of view, the study of the environmental qualityeconomic growth relationship began during the second quinquennium of the 1980s. Several studies (Grossman and Krueger [1]; Pearce and Warford [2]; World Commission on Environment and Development [3]) emphasized the importance of integrating environmental concerns into the planning process in order to ensure sustainable development. Thus, these researches are the first to use the concept of EKC (the environmental Kuznets curve). These

researches have shown the existence of an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth (measured by the increase in per capita income) and certain indicators of environmental quality. In other words, economic growth negatively affects environmental quality by generating more polluting environment, whereas after a certain threshold, further improvement in economic growth contributes to improving the quality of the environment. Thus, the validity of this assumption depends on the short- and long-term impact of GDP on CO2 emissions. Then, the EKC is accepted if the coefficient of the income indicator, in the short term, is higher than that in the long term. Moreover, this hypothesis can be tested by integrating the GDP and the square of the GDP in the same model. In this case, the EKC is accepted if the GDP coefficient is positive and the GDP squared coefficient is negative. Thus, environmental degradation may decrease in the long run as incomes become sufficiently high. So, on the face value, one solution to the problem of environmental degradation is to improve economic growth [4].

In recent decades, information and communication technologies (ICT) have ameliorated the quality of life by becoming one of the important pillars of society. In fact, ICT has an impact on economic prosperity [5, 6] and economic growth process [7, 8].

The rapid increase in information and telecommunications technologies (ICT) contributes to various sectors of an economy. However, the impact of ICT on CO2 emissions cannot be ignored [9–13].

For the role of ICT on ameliorating the impact of economic growth on CO2 emissions, Danish et al. [14] showed that the interaction between ICT and GDP mitigates the level of pollution.

There are a large number of papers empirically examining the issues of the impact of ICT and economic growth on environmental quality and the impact of economic growth on CO2 emissions using the tools of econometric analysis. However, studies on interaction between ICT and economic growth-environmental quality nexus is still limited. So, the objective of this study is to examine the effect of ICT on CO2 emissions by integrating economic growth for the case of Tunisia and Morocco. The study presents new features of the interaction of ICT and economic growth. In other words, we will try to examine how ICT can ameliorate the impact of economic growth on CO2 emissions.

The study contributes to the specialized literature in at least three ways. First, we examine the short-run and the long-run relationship between ICT and economic growth using ARDL models, while other previous empirical studies have neglected the panel cointegration and the long-run relationship between these two variables. Second, we study the effect of ICT and environmental quality using four different measures of ICT (mobile subscriptions, fixed broadband subscriptions, fixed-line subscriptions, and the Internet), while other previous empirical studies have used only one or two measures of ICT.

In other words, the study allows us to assess the responsibility or the contribution of each measure of ICT in mitigating the CO2 emissions. Finally, our research focuses on the Tunisia and Morocco countries, while after our knowledge, there are only a few studies, especially recent, which are focused on the MENA countries, and which have analyzed the impact of ICT and economic growth on the environmental quality. This study is presented as follows: Following the introduction, Section 2 presents a spatial study: a comparative analysis between Tunisia and Morocco. Section 3 presents the data and the model employed in this paper, respectively. Section 4 provides the empirical findings. In Section 5, some concluding remarks and policy recommendations are made.

*Does the Interaction between ICT Diffusion and Economic Growth Reduce CO2 Emissions?… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.102945*
