In this paper, we tried to contribute to the previous literature by analyzing the relationship between renewable energy consumption, socio-economic factors and health in the presence of a stringent environmental policy and lobbying power. Using a Panel Vector Auto-Regressive (PVAR) technique, we specifically examine the role of the government effectiveness and the lobbying pressure in moderating the impact of renewable energy consumption on CO2 emissions, economic growth and health factor considering the case of Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Net Oil Importing Countries (NOICs) from 1996 to 2019. Our analysis shows that (i) environmental policy stringency and good governance will induce a rise in the level of renewable energy consumption; (ii) lobbying power and interest groups discourage the renewable energy sector’s development since the add in economic growth of these economies is not oriented towards renewable energy projects; (iii) a rise in renewable energy consumption, perhaps generated by renewable energy policies, should favor the improvement of public health. Finally, the political implications of the findings are summarized and discussed.

The aim of this study is to investigate the long-term relationship between real gross domestic product (GDP), energy consumption (EC), and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions using: (i) fully modified ordinary least square (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least square (DOLS) estimates, to deal with the bias of endogeneity regressors and the countries’ heterogeneity, and (ii) a pooled mean group (PMG) estimator, to involve both pooling and averaging for a dynamic specification based on the auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) model. Regarding five North African countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Egypt) over the period of 1971–2014, our empirical findings seem relevant in the light of economic developments, and indicate that increased energy consumption gives rise to both GDP growth and increased CO2 emissions, as a result of more pollution. This leads us to conclude that North African countries should improve the productivity of their energy by increasing: (i) the implementation of energy-saving projects, energy conservation, energy efficiency, and energy infrastructure, while outsourcing to achieve GDP growth as well as increasing their investment in full-energy-potential projects, and (ii) the use of more renewable energy in order to mitigate emissions.