This article extends the recent findings of Liu (2005), Ang (2007), Apergis et al. (2009) and Payne (2010) by implementing recent bootstrap panel unit root tests and cointegration techniques to investigate the relationship between carbon dioxide emissions, energy consumption, and real GDP for 12 Middle East and North African Countries (MENA) over the period 1981-2005. Our results show that in the long-run energy consumption has a positive significant impact on CO2 emissions. More interestingly, we show that real GDP exhibits a quadratic relationship with CO2 emissions for the region as a whole. However, although the estimated long-run coefficients of income and its square satisfy the EKC hypothesis in most studied countries, the turning points are very low in some cases and very high in other cases, hence providing poor evidence in support of the EKC hypothesis. CO2 emission reductions per capita have been achieved in the MENA region, even while the region exhibited economic growth over the period 1981-2005. The econometric relationships derived in this paper suggest that future reductions in CO2 emissions per capita might be achieved at the same time as GDP per capita in the MENA region continues to grow. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.