Abstract
Sustainable transportation indicators have attracted significant attention from policymakers, engineers, and academics. This heightened interest can be attributed to the transportation industry's impact on economic growth, poverty alleviation, and the environment. While numerous studies have explored the relationships between the transportation sector, poverty, economic growth, and environmental degradation on a global scale, there is a noticeable research gap concerning the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. This study addresses this gap by investigating the nexus between poverty, transportation-related CO2 emissions, economic growth, trade openness, urbanization, road infrastructure and transportation energy consumption in 14 MENA regions from 1983 to 2021. To achieve this objective, this investigation employs the panel pooled mean group-autoregressive distributed lag (PMG-ARDL) model to explore the long-term relationships among these variables. The findings, as revealed by the Dumitrescu-Hurlin panel causality, show a reciprocal relationship between poverty, transportation-related CO2 emissions and economic growth. Moreover, the study identifies a unidirectional relationship running from road infrastructure to poverty. Additionally, a unidirectional causality runs from both economic growth and poverty to transportation-related energy consumption. Furthermore, a bidirectional causality exists between trade openness and transport CO2 emissions, and a unidirectional causality running from trade openness to economic growth. These findings emphasize the importance of policymakers to adopt strategies that equally prioritize poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, and economic development to attain sustainable transportation in MENA region.