Can regional trade integration facilitate renewable energy transition to ensure energy sustainability in South Asia

By Muntasir Murshed. 2021

198 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract This paper primarily aimed to assess the impacts of regional trade integration on the prospects of undergoing renewable energy transition in selected South Asian economies between 1992 and 2015. The overall results from the econometric analyses, controlling for the cross-sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity issues, highlight the importance of promoting intra-regional trade among the South Asian economies to boost the renewable energy consumption shares and renewable electricity output shares in the total final energy consumption and aggregate electricity output figures, respectively. Besides, the non-linearity of the nexuses between intra-regional trade shares and renewable energy consumption shares and between intra-regional trade shares and renewable electricity output shares are also ascertained. The threshold intra-regional trade shares concerning the renewable energy consumption and renewable electricity output shares are predicted at 20.53% and 17.50%, respectively. However, the predicted threholds are significantly higher than the current average intra-regional trade share in South Asia. Moreover, the panel causality analysis reveals unidirectional causal relationships stemming from intra-regional trade shares to renewable energy consumption and renewable electricity output shares. Besides, greater FDI inflows are found to reduce the overall use of renewable energy while higher levels of economic growth and CO2 emissions are found to catalyze renewable energy use in South Asia. Furthermore, the results also implicate a non-linear U-shaped association between positive crude oil price shocks and renewable energy consumption and renewable electricity output shares. Therefore, these findings impose critically important policy implications for liberalizing the intra-regional trade barriers, reducing dirty foreign direct investment inflows, expediting economic growth, reducing fossil fuel dependency and abating carbon dioxide emissions to facilitate renewable energy transition in South Asia.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7eda943149d60d6b1e9c01198b2d5dd044f387b

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Citations in the corpus

Renewable Energy Consumption and Economic Growth Nexus—A Systematic Literature Review (2022, background): “At the same time, increased economic growth and CO2 emissions in the area, particularly in Bangladesh, stimulate the use of renewable energy (Murshed 2021).”
Renewable Energy Use and Ecological Footprints Mitigation: Evidence from Selected South Asian Economies (2021, background): “Similarly, the shares of renewable electricity in these nations’ respective electricity outputs have remained significantly low compared to other similar developing nations across the globe [7,8].”
The roles of export diversification and composite country risks in carbon emissions abatement: evidence from the signatories of the regional comprehensive economic partnership agreement (2021, background): “Furthermore, the RCEP countries have also pledged to undertake local and international policies, under the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) agenda of the United Nations, to ensure economic, social, and environmental sustainability across the globe (Kumar, Kumar, and Vivekadhish 2016; Leal Fi”