An empirical analysis of the non-linear impacts of ICT-trade openness on renewable energy transition, energy efficiency,
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
An empirical analysis of the non-linear impacts of ICT-trade openness on renewable energy transition, energy efficiency, clean cooking fuel access and environmental sustainability in South Asia Muntasir Murshed 1 Received: 12 March 2020 / Accepted: 28 May 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Energy security and environmental sustainability have become an integral policy agenda worldwide whereby the global economic growth policies are being restructured to ensure the reliability of energy supply and safeguard environmental well-being as well. However, technological inefficiency is one of the major hindrances in attaining these over-arching goals. Hence, this paper probed into the non-linear impacts of ICT trade on the prospects of undergoing renewable energy transition, improving energy use efficiencies, enhancing access to cleaner cooking fuels, and mitigating carbon dioxide emissions across selected South Asian economies: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Maldives. The results from the econometric analyses reveal that ICT trade directly increases renewable energy consumption, enhances renewable energy shares, reduces intensity of energy use, facilitates adoption of cleaner cooking fuels, and reduces carbon-dioxide emissions. Moreover, ICT trade also indirectly mitigates carbon-dioxide emissions through boosting renewable energy consumption levels, improving energy efficiencies, and enhancing cleaner cooking fuel access. Hence, these results, in a nutshell, portray the significance of reducing the barriers to ICT trade with respect to ensuring energy security and environmental sustainability across South Asia. Therefore, it is ideal for the government to gradually lessen the trade barriers to boost the volumes of cross-border flows of green ICT commodities. Besides, it is also recommended to attract foreign direct investments for the potential development of the respective ICT sectors of the South Asian economies. Keywords ICT trade . Renewable energy transition . Energyefficiency . Cleaner cooking fuels . CO2 emissions . Energy security . Environmental sustainability JEL classifications O13 . O14 . P28 . Q2 . Q42
Introduction The conventional reliance on use of the environmentally unfriendly non-renewable energy (NRE) resources to meet the world energy demand has eventually evoked consensus among the global economies for attaining both socioeconomic and environmental sustainability, particularly through optimal utilization of the relatively cleaner renewable energy (RE) alternatives. The monotonic dependency on the combustion Responsible editor: Nicholas Apergis * Muntasir Murshed [email protected] 1
School of Business and Economics, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh
of the NRE resources has attributed to over-exploitation of these finite resources, thus, jeopardizing the global energy security phenomena to a large extent (Murshed and Tanha 2020). Besides, insufficient supply of the primary NRE resources has also com
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