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Environmental degradation has become a severe concern across South Asia. Hence, it is imperative to model the macroeconomic determinants of environmental quality across this region. The traditional fossil fuel dependency of the major South Asian nations is alleged to have persistently deteriorated the quality of the environment across this region. Under such circumstances, it can be hypothesized that intra-regional trade within South Asia can facilitate renewable electricity trade to enhance environmental well-being. Accordingly, this study aims to evaluate the impacts of intra-regional trade integration, renewable energy transition, economic growth, and foreign direct investment inflows on the ecological footprints of selected South Asian economies. The econometric methods used in this study are suited for handling cross-sectionally dependent heterogeneous panel datasets. The overall results reveal that promoting intra-regional trade, stimulating renewable energy transition, expediting economic growth, and impeding inflows of dirty foreign direct investments are imperative for reducing the ecological footprint figures of the South Asian nations of concern. Besides, the results also verify the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis for the South Asian panel as well as for Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Bhutan but not for India and Pakistan. Moreover, the pollution haven hypothesis is also verified for both the panel and the individual South Asian countries. In line with these findings, several environmental welfare improvement-related policies are recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Improving environmental quality across South Asia has become one of the utmost important policy agendas of the concerned governments. The susceptibility of the majority of the South Asian countries to multifaceted climate change adversities has motivated the need to identify the factors that can function to ensure environmental sustainability across South Asia. Although several studies have highlighted the importance of globalization and cleaner energy use in tackling the environmental degradaton issues of the South Asian countries, very little is known regarding the impacts of regional trade and renewable energy transition in this regard. Hence, this paper aims to scrutinize the effects of enhancing intra‐regional trade integration and undergoing renewable energy transition on per capita carbon dioxide emissions in the context of six South Asian nations between 1990 and 2016. The results from the recently developed cross‐sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag regression approach, accounting for cross‐sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity issues, reveal that facilitating trade among the South Asian neighbors reduces carbon emissions in both the short and long run. Moreover, enhancing the share of renewable energy in the aggregate energy consumption figures is also found to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in both the short and long run. Furthermore, both regional trade integration and renewable energy transition are found to jointly reduce carbon dioxide emissions in South Asia. The results also authenticate the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, while financial development and urbanization are found to boost carbon dioxide emissions only in the long run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the dynamic effect of non-renewable energy, renewable energy, economic growth, and foreign direct investment on environmental degradation in twenty selected African countries over the period 2000–2015. We have adopted Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis and the Pollution Haven/Halo hypothesis simultaneously. In the first stage, this paper performs cross-independence test and found cross-sectional dependence in carbon emissions, non-renewable energy, and renewable energy. In the second stage, it applies first generation and second generation unit root tests for panel data and found that all concerning variables are I(1) except for economic growth which is found I(0). Therefore, we used the Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach using Pooled Mean Group, Mean Group, and Dynamic Fixed Effect estimators. The results indicate that all independent variables are significant and positive to CO 2 emissions except for renewable energy found significant and negative to CO2 emissions, and foreign direct investment found significant and positive only in the long term. Moreover, the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis did not hold in our sample, while we found strong evidence for the Pollution Haven hypothesis in selected African countries. • non-renewable energy, renewable energy, economic growth, and foreign direct investment-CO 2 emissions relationship is investigated. • Positive effect of non-renewable energy and negative effect of renewable energy are found. • The Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis does not hold. • The Pollution Haven hypothesis is verified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]