Renewable energy, nuclear energy, and environmental pollution: Accounting for political institutional quality in South Africa.

By S. Sarkodie, Samuel Olorunfemi Adams. Science of the Total Environment, 2018

608 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study examined the impact of disaggregate and aggregate energy, economic development, urbanization and political institutional quality on environmental pollution using a time series data spanning from 1971 to 2017. The study employed response surface regressions, structural break cumulative sum (CUSUM) test based on recursive residuals and ordinary least squares (OLS) residuals for parameter stability en route to estimating the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) regression. The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis is valid in South Africa with an extreme point of ZAR 56,114 which occurred in 2011. Evidence from the study reveals that political institutional quality plays a huge role in the social, governance and economic readiness to mitigate climate change and its impact. Structural adjustment in disaggregate and aggregate energy consumption, economic growth, and political institutional quality play a critical role in environmental quality. Fossil-fuel rich countries require diversification of the energy portfolio by incorporating renewable energy sources which will promote environmental sustainability and improve air quality while reducing their economy's vulnerability to price volatility. A paradigm shift from energy and carbon-intensive industries to a service-oriented economy will cause a structural economic change thus, aiding in the mitigation of climate change and its impacts.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a63a482448e2a7c15922e32e51a5c6e57308fe66

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Citations in the corpus

Green innovation and China’s CO2 emissions – the moderating effect of institutional quality (2021, background): “…higher institutional quality has more strict environmental regulations and policies, and has a greater effect on environmental quality (Sarkodie and Adams 2018; Zakaria and Bibi 2019; Sun et al. 2019; Salman et al. 2019; Tamazian and Rao 2010; Bhattacharya, Churchill, and Paramati 2017; Abid 2017;…”
Investigation of environmental Kuznets curve for ecological footprint: The role of energy and financial development. (2019, background): “Sarkodie and Strezov (2019b) 312 revealed that the U-shape relationship occurs when energy intensity increases per 313 economic outcome, thus, reducing energy efficiency.”
Financial development and environmental degradation: Do human capital and institutional quality make a difference? (2021, background): “7 is also reported by Shahbaz et al. (2016) for Pakistan, Charfeddine and Ben Khediri (2016) for the UAE, Baloch et al.”
Natural resources abundance, economic globalization, and carbon emissions: Advancing sustainable development agenda (2021, background): “Similarly, Sarkodie and Adams (2018) concluded that deforestation, mining, and chain saw operations are leading sources of environmental pollution and natural habitat loss.”