Governance and renewable energy investment in MENA countries:How does trade matter?

Rihab Bellakhal, Sonia Ben Kheder and Houda Haffoudhi

Energy Economics, 2019, vol. 84, issue C

Abstract: The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries have recently developed renewable energy (RE) markets. However, their rate of investment in renewable energy remains small compared to other regions in the world despite their relatively abundant endowments, particularly in wind and solar. While the literature identifies some barriers to investment in renewable energy, we assume that the investment of MENA countries could be impeded by specific governance factors. Furthermore, we consider recent literature showing that trade openness reduces the negative effects of weak governance. In this paper, we empirically investigate the link between governance, openness, and renewable energy investment in the MENA region using panel data for 15 MENA countries over the period 1996-2013. Our results prove that a higher institutional quality is associated with RE investment in MENA countries. In addition, this relationship seems to be conditional on the trade regime. Our results are robust to several measures of renewable energy investment and governance as well as to an alternative econometric set-up.

Keywords: Renewable energy; Governance; Trade openness; Interaction effect; Panel data models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (35)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140988319303366
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:eneeco:v:84:y:2019:i:c:s0140988319303366

DOI: 10.1016/j.eneco.2019.104541

Access Statistics for this article

Energy Economics is currently edited by R. S. J. Tol, Beng Ang, Lance Bachmeier, Perry Sadorsky, Ugur Soytas and J. P. Weyant

More articles in Energy Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().