Does ICT trade facilitate renewable energy transition and environmental sustainability? Evidence from Bangladesh, India,
- PDF / 748,551 Bytes
- 26 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 17 Downloads / 211 Views
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Does ICT trade facilitate renewable energy transition and environmental sustainability? Evidence from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Maldives Muntasir Murshed1 1 2
•
Meem Hasin Chadni1 • Jannatul Ferdaus2
School of Business and Economics, North South University, Dhaka, Bangladesh Department of Economics, Comilla University, Cumilla, Bangladesh
Received: 12 March 2020 / Revised: 1 September 2020 / Accepted: 4 September 2020 The Joint Center on Global Change and Earth System Science of the University of Maryland and Beijing Normal University 2020
Abstract Consumption of fossil fuels has triggered the worldwide awareness to attain socioeconomic and environmental sustainability, particularly by enhancing renewable energy use and mitigating the environmental adversities, in tandem. Against this background, this paper aimed to investigate the impacts of promoting ICT trade, through liberalization of the associated trade barriers, on the prospects of undergoing renewable energy transition and limiting environmental degradation by curbing CO2 emissions across six South Asian economies. The overall results from the econometric analyses, in a nutshell, confirm that higher degrees of openness to ICT trade lead to greater consumption of renewable energy, improve energy use efficiency levels and enhance access to cleaner cooking fuels. However, ICT trade fails to elevate the renewable energy shares in aggregate final energy consumption figures in South Asia. Besides, ICT trade is also seen to boost CO2 emissions across this region; although the impacts seem to reverse upon enhancement in renewable energy consumption levels along with liberalization of the ICT trade barriers. Thus, these results impose key policy implications for the South Asian governments for simultaneously ensuring energy security and sustaining environmental well-being across South Asia. Keywords ICT Renewable energy transition Carbon emissions Cross-sectional dependence South Asia JEL Classifications O13 O14 P28 Q2 Q42
& Muntasir Murshed [email protected]
1 Introduction The traditional monotonic dependency on the consumption of non-renewable fossil fuels has eventually triggered a consensus, among the global economies, for ensuring energy security and simultaneously mitigating the environmental adversities stemming from fossil fuel combustion worldwide. Conventionally, such predominant reliance on fossil fuels has resulted in brisk exhaustion of their reserves; thus, the global energy sustainability goals have largely been jeopardized (Asif and Muneer 2007; Vivoda 2010). Besides, the finite supplies of these primary energy resources have attributed to the unreliability of the secondary energy supplies as well. A particular reason behind this phenomenon could be due to the global power generation volumes often lagging behind the corresponding installed capacities particularly due to the acute primary energy supply constraints (Xue et al. 2014). Apart from the persistent depletion of
Data Loading...
