No abstract

Phasing out fossil fuel dependency to adopt renewable energy technologies is pertinent for both ensuring energy security and for safeguarding the well-being of the environment. However, financial constraints often restrict the developing countries, in particular, from undergoing the renewable energy transition that is necessary for easing the environmental hardships. Against this background, this study makes a novel attempt to evaluate the impacts of FDI inflows on enhancing renewable energy use and attaining environmental sustainability in Bangladesh between 1972 and 2015. Using the autoregressive distributed lags with structural break approach to estimate the short- and long-run elasticities, it is found that FDI inflows enhance the share of renewable electricity output in the total electricity output levels of the country. Besides, FDI inflows are also evidenced to directly hamper environmental quality by boosting the ecological footprints figures of Bangladesh. Hence, it can be said that FDI promotes renewable electricity generation in Bangladesh but transforms the nation into a pollution haven. However, although FDI inflows cannot directly reduce the ecological footprints, a joint ecological footprint mitigation impact of FDI inflows and renewable electricity generation is evidenced. Besides, the findings also verify the authenticity of the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis in Bangladesh’s context. Therefore, economic growth can be referred to as being both the cause and the panacea to the environmental problems faced by Bangladesh. These results, in a nutshell, calls for effective measures to be undertaken for attracting the relatively cleaner FDI in Bangladesh whereby the objectives of renewable energy transition and environmental sustainability can be achieved in tandem. In line with these findings, several appropriate financial globalization policies are recommended.

Improving environmental quality across South Asia has become one of the utmost important policy agendas of the concerned governments. The susceptibility of the majority of the South Asian countries to multifaceted climate change adversities has motivated the need to identify the factors that can function to ensure environmental sustainability across South Asia. Although several studies have highlighted the importance of globalization and cleaner energy use in tackling the environmental degradaton issues of the South Asian countries, very little is known regarding the impacts of regional trade and renewable energy transition in this regard. Hence, this paper aims to scrutinize the effects of enhancing intra-regional trade integration and undergoing renewable energy transition on per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the context of six South Asian nations between 1990 and 2016. The results from the recently developed cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag regression approach, accounting for cross-sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity issues, reveal that facilitating trade among the South Asian neighbors reduces carbon emissions in both the short and long run. Moreover, enhancing the share of renewable energy in the aggregate energy consumption figures is also found to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in both the short and long run. Furthermore, both regional trade integration and renewable energy transition are found to jointly reduce carbon dioxide emissions in South Asia. The results also authenticate the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, while financial development and urbanization are found to boost carbon dioxide emissions only in the long run.

The group of seven (G-7) countries are seven of the most advanced global nations. Yet, these nations have not been able to achieve environmentally sustainable economic growth (EG) in the past. Consequently, despite growing economically, the environmental quality in the G-7 countries has persistently deteriorated. Hence, the present study examined the environmental impacts associated with EG, technological innovation, institutional quality (IQ), renewable energy consumption (RENE) and population using the carbon dioxide emission figures to measure environmental quality in the G-7 economies for the period 1996–2018. The econometric analyses involved the application of different estimation techniques that control the cross-sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity issues in the data. Overall, the results indicated that greater EG and higher population size increase environmental pollution by boosting the carbon dioxide emission levels. In contrast, technological innovation, IQ improvement, and greater RENE were found to impede the carbon dioxide emission levels. In line with these key findings, several environmental development-related policies are recommended.

Drifting away from the neoclassical growth conjecture of economic growth being solely dependent on capital and labor inputs, this paper aimed to evaluate the dynamic impacts of energy consumption, energy prices and imported energy-dependency on both gross and sectoral value-added figures of Sri Lanka. The analysis has particularly used the robust econometric methods that can account for structural break issues in the data. The results, in a nutshell, indicated that energy consumption homogeneously contributes to gross, agricultural, industrial and services value-additions in Sri Lanka. However, positive oil price shocks and greater shares of imported energy in the total energy consumption figures are found to dampen the growth figures, especially in the context of the gross, industrial and services value additions. Besides, the joint growth-inhibiting impacts of oil price movements and energy import-dependency are also ascertained. On the other hand, the causality estimates reveal bidirectional causal associations between energy consumption-gross value-added and energy consumption-industrial value-added. In contrast, no causal impact of energy consumption on the agricultural and services value-added is evidenced. Hence, these findings impose key policy implications for constructing crucial energy policy reforms to make sure that the economic growth performances of Sri Lanka are sustained in the future.