Renewable energy, carbon emission and economic growth: A revised environmental Kuznets Curve perspective

By Shujie Yao, Shuai Zhang, Xingmin Zhang. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019

340 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Renewable energy plays an important role in reducing global carbon (CO2) emission. This paper builds a RER (renewable energy consumption rate) index to represent the energy structure of a country and proposes a U-shaped RKC (renewable energy Kuznets Curve) hypothesis between RER and economic growth. We also examine the dynamic relationship between RER and the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis using two panel data sets of 17 major developing and developed countries as well as six geo-economic regions of the world during 1990–2014. Panel co-integration tests indicate that a long-run relationship exists among economic growth, RER and carbon emission. We employ the fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and the dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) techniques to estimate the co-integration coefficients of the panels and individual countries/regions respectively. The results verify both the EKC and RKC hypotheses, indicating that a 10% rise in RER would to a 1.6% carbon emission reduction. It is also found that the RKC turning points of individual countries and the entire samples in general take place before the turning points of the respective EKCs. It suggests that promoting renewable energy consumption to make RKC cross its turning point earlier can accelerate EKC to reach its turning point more quickly. This finding has important policy implications with respect to the development and utilization of renewable energy and environmental protection.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/38682ea0c33ab1ab9b6f5bcd272288e4b0362c6d

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In Economics and Econometrics

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Citations in the corpus

A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights (2020, background): “…in primary energy composition and different stages in renewable energy deployment are also seen as key reasons for differing results regarding the existence of an EKC for CO2 (Chien and Hu 2007, Fang 2011, Menegaki 2011, Tiwari 2011, Salim and Rafiq 2012, Tugcu et al 2012, Yao et al 2019).”