Renewable and Non-Renewable Energy Consumption and Trade Policy: Do They Matter for Environmental Sustainability?

Yugang He
Additional contact information
Yugang He: Department of China Trade and Commerce, College of Liberal Arts, Sejong University, Seoul 05006, Korea

Energies, 2022, vol. 15, issue 10, 1-17

Abstract: In the extant literature, there are numerous discussions on China’s environmental sustainability. However, few scholars have considered renewable energy consumption and trade policy simultaneously to debate environmental sustainability. Therefore, this paper attempts to examine how renewable and non-renewable energy consumption, bio-capacity, economic growth, and trade policy dynamically affect the ecological footprint (a proxy for environmental sustainability). Using the data from 1971 to 2017 and employing the auto-regressive distributed lag model to perform an empirical analysis, the results demonstrate that renewable energy consumption and trade policy are conducive to environmental sustainability because of their negative impacts on the ecological footprint. However, the results also indicate that bio-capacity, non-renewable energy consumption, and economic growth are putting increasing pressure on environmental sustainability due to their positive impacts on the ecological footprint. Moreover, to determine the direction of causality between the highlighted variables, the Yoda-Yamamoto causality test was conducted. The results suggest a two-way causal relationship between renewable energy consumption and ecological footprint, non-renewable energy consumption and ecological footprint, and economic growth and ecological footprint. Conversely, the results also suggest a one-way causal relationship running from bio-capacity and trade policy to the ecological footprint.

Keywords: renewable and non-renewable energy consumption; trade policy; bio-capacity; economic growth; ecological footprint; environmental sustainability; auto-regressive distributed lag model; Toda-Yamamoto causality test (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/10/3559/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/10/3559/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:15:y:2022:i:10:p:3559-:d:814248

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().