Renewable Energy Use and Ecological Footprints Mitigation: Evidence from Selected South Asian Economies

Lian Xue, Mohammad Haseeb, Haider Mahmood (), Tarek Tawfik Yousef Alkhateeb and Muntasir Murshed
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Lian Xue: School of Information Management, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Mohammad Haseeb: Institute for Region and Urban-Rural Development, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430072, China
Tarek Tawfik Yousef Alkhateeb: Department of Agricultural Economics, Kafrelsheikh University, Kafrelsheikh 33511, Egypt

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 4, 1-20

Abstract: Fossil fuel-dependency has induced a trade-off between economic growth and environmental degradation across the developing nations in particular. Against this backdrop, this study aims to evaluate the impacts of renewable energy use on the ecological footprints in the context of four South Asian fossil fuel-dependent nations: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The econometric analysis involves the use of recently developed methods that account for cross-sectional dependency, slope heterogeneity, and structural break issues in the data. The results reveal that renewable energy consumption reduces the ecological footprints while nonrenewable energy use boosts the ecological footprints. The results also confirm the validity of the environmental Kuznets curve and pollution haven hypotheses for the panel of the South Asian nations. Besides, foreign direct investment inflows are found to degrade the environment while higher institutional quality improves it. Furthermore, unidirectional causalities are run from overall energy use, economic growth, and institutional quality to ecological footprints. At the same time, bidirectional associations between foreign direct investment inflows and ecological footprints are also ascertained. The overall findings highlight the pertinence of reducing fossil fuel-dependency, enhancing economic growth, restricting dirty foreign direct investment inflows, and improving institutional quality to ensure environmental sustainability across South Asia.

Keywords: renewable energy; ecological footprints; environmental sustainability; cross-sectional dependency; slope heterogeneity; structural breaks; sustainability; environment; South Asia; fossil fuels (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (40)

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