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Nexus among economic growth, carbon emissions, and renewable and non-renewable energy in China

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Abstract

Due to the significant changes of economic growth rate, energy structure, and energy efficiency in China, whether energy policies should be adjusted is worthy of attention. This paper employs ARDL-ECM and Toda-Yamamoto causality to investigate the relationship between renewable energy, non-renewable energy, carbon emissions, economic growth, gross fixed capital formation, and urban population spanning the period 1960–2019 in China. The examined results of ARDL-ECM indicate that renewable energy both have positive impact on GDP in the short term and long term but non-renewable energy only have positive impact on GDP in the short term. Additionally, based on Toda-Yamamoto causality, this paper finds a unidirectional Granger causality running from economic growth to energy consumption and from energy consumption to carbon emissions. And there is a unidirectional Granger causality running from GDP to non-renewable energy consumption. It is worth noting that renewable energy consumption and economic growth have positive bidirectional influence on each other. The study findings suggest that stricter energy conservation and pollution emission reduction policy should be implemented and renewable energy should be applied on a larger scale in order to achieve the goal of sustainable economic development.

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Notes

  1. “The Paris Agreement” is a climate change agreement adopted at the Paris Climate Change Conference on December 12, 2015 and signed in New York on April 22, 2016. The agreement makes arrangements for global response to climate change after 2020.

  2. All data including GDP, gross fixed capital formation, energy consumption, renewable energy consumption, non-renewable energy consumption, and urban population are obtained from http://www.stats.gov.cn/.

  3. This target is from the important speech of President Xi at the general debate of the 75th General Assembly of the United Nations on September 22, 2020.

  4. This goal comes from the 2020 China Power Development Planning Forum.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees and the editor of this journal.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Funding

This study is financially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72074075), the 2018 Key Projects of Philosophy and Social Sciences Research, Ministry of Education, China (Grant No. 18JZD032), and the National Key Research and Development Project (Grant No. 2020YFB1707800).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Economics and Management, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, 102206, China

    Xinyue Zhang & Xingping Zhang

  2. Beijing Key Laboratory of New Energy and Low-Carbon Development, North China Electric Power University, Beijing, 102206, China

    Xingping Zhang

Authors
  1. Xinyue Zhang
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  2. Xingping Zhang
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Contributions

Xinyue Zhang: formal analysis, data curation, and writing-original draft

Xingping Zhang: writing-review and editing

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Correspondence to Xingping Zhang.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 7 F-bound test of model (1)
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Fig. 5
figure 5

CUSUM and CUSUM of squares test of model (1)

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Table 8 F-bound test of model (2)
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Fig. 6
figure 6

CUSUM and CUSUM of squares test of model (2)

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Table 9 Lag order selection criteria of model (1)
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Table 10 Lag order selection criteria of model (2)
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Fig. 7
figure 7

Unit circle test of model (2)

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Zhang, X., Zhang, X. Nexus among economic growth, carbon emissions, and renewable and non-renewable energy in China. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 39708–39722 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13218-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13218-9

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