This paper investigates the short-run and long-run causality analysis between biomass energy consumption and economic growth in the selected 10 developing and emerging countries by using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag bounds testing (ARDL) approach of cointegration and error correction models. It covers annual data from 1980 to 2009. The cointegration test results show that there is cointegration between the biomass energy consumption and the economic growth in nine of the ten countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru). The cointegration test results show that there is no cointegration between the biomass energy consumption and the economic growth in one of the ten countries (Paraguay). (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.