This paper aims to empirically shed light on the pertinence of enhancing trade and foreign capital flows with relevance to stimulating greater use of renewable energy resources across selected South Asian economies namely Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The economic transition from the use of non‐renewable energy tothe renewable alternatives is an interesting genre of research keeping the partial attainment of the United Nations' 2030 Sustainable Development Goals agenda into consideration. Against this milieu, trade and financial liberalization policies are anticipated to play a pivotal role in facilitating the renewable energy transition phenomenon across South Asia. The overall results from the econometric analyses imply that higher degrees of trade openness and greater foreign currency inflows can invariably play critically important roles in amplifying the shares of renewables in the total energy consumption levels across this region. Thus, these findings impose key policy implications for attainment of energy sustainability across South Asia.

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Inflows of foreign currencies into the developing economies, in particular, have been associated with the Dutch disease phenomenon whereby a surge in such inflows is believed to stimulate real appreciation of the real exchange rate. As a result, there could be deindustrialization impacts on the recipient economies following a growth in the non-tradable sector at the expense of the tradable sector's contraction. This paper empirically investigates the dynamics of real exchange rate responses to official development assistance, foreign direct investments and international remittances flowing into the four emerging South Asian economies Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The results from the extensive econometric analyses show that a 1% rise in the total volume of official development assistance and remittances received appreciates the real exchange rate by 0.18% and 0.23% respectively. In contrast, a 1% rise in FDI inflows was found to trigger a 0.19% depreciation of the real exchange rate. Furthermore, the Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012) test results reveal unidirectional long run causalities running from official development assistances and FDI inflow to real exchange rate while certifying a bidirectional causal association between inward international remittances and the real exchange rate. Contribution/Originality: This paper makes a novel attempt to model the real exchange rate responses to foreign inflows, using panel-data estimators, in the context of the selected South Asian Economies. 1. INTRODUCTION In the contemporary era of globalization, economies have become more exposed to engagement in multilateral