Can using energy resources productively and promoting good governance boost carbon productivity? An economic growth-environmental degradation decoupling analysis on 116 global countries

Does foreign direct investment influence carbon emission-related environmental problems? Contextual evidence from developing countries across Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan African nations face multifaceted environmental problems, especially those associated with carbon discharges. Hence, this study calculates a composite carbon index in the context of 39 developing nations from this region and uses it as a proxy for the carbon emission-related environmental problems they have faced during the 2000-2020 period. This index is estimated by utilizing data regarding annual carbon dioxide discharges, output-based carbon productivity rates, and energy consumption-based carbon intensity levels in the concerned countries. Hence, policy takeaways from this study have critical relevance for the selected sub-Saharan African nations to help them achieve the objectives related to the Sustainable Development Goals agenda and the Paris Accord. Overall, the findings from the econometric analyses verify that more receipt of foreign direct investment initially raises but later on reduces environmental problems. Thus, the nexus concerning these variables depicts an inverse U-shape. Besides, the results endorse that greening the energy consumption structures of the sampled sub-Saharan African countries helps to abate their environmental problems in the long run while financial development aggravates the extent of environmental adversities that take place. Lastly, improving the quality of regulatory agencies enables the Sub-Saharan African nations to further mitigate their environmental problems. Moreover, these aforementioned findings are observed to be heterogeneous across low- and middle-income categories of the selected Sub-Saharan African countries. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of the findings is also confirmed by the outcomes derived from the country-specific analyses. Nevertheless, these nations should attract clean energy-embodying foreign direct investment, make their energy consumption structures greener by amplifying renewable energy adoption rates, introduce green funds to develop their financial sectors, and make their environmental regulatory agencies more transparent with their activities.

Assessing the influence of energy transition on economic-social growth: the case of China

In recent years, because of the one-sided interpretation of the nexus between the green & low-carbon energy transition and the high-quality economic-social growth, some over-idealized due-oriented judgments have led to failures in theories or deviations from practices. It is necessary and typical to select the panel data of 30 provinces in China from 2010 to 2020 to demonstrate that nexus, since China plays a different role in both climate change and global energy security. This paper defines and measures both the high-quality economic-social growth and the green & low-carbon energy transition efficiency. After analyzing the structure characteristics of energy transition, it also discusses the impact of the transition efficiency on the high-quality growth. The results indicate that the inflection point from quantitative to qualitative change in the regional high-quality growth has not yet arrived, while the developed regions and the developing regions are still grappling with pronounced problems of imbalance and insufficiency. As far as now, the energy transition efficiency in the energy resource centers is much higher than that in the energy load centers. The provinces with a characteristic of energy supply-demand equilibrium have seamlessly shifted from the Introduction stage of green & low-carbon development to the Growth stage. Both the decrease in energy intensity and the increase in renewable share are able to promote high-quality economic-social development obviously; however, the reduction of per capita carbon emission cannot yield the expected positive externality in a short run.