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Exploring the effect of renewable energy on low-carbon sustainable development in the Belt and Road Initiative countries: evidence from the spatial-temporal perspective

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Abstract

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has promoted the deployment of renewable energy to achieve sustainability. It is essential to reveal the influence of renewable energy on low-carbon economic development. The share of renewable energy consumption (SREC) is taken as the core explanatory variable in this paper, and its impacts on carbon emission intensity (CEI) and economic growth are investigated from the spatial-temporal perspective. First, the panel Granger causality test is applied for revealing the causal links among SREC, CEI, and economic growth during 1999–2017. Then, this paper investigates the impacts of SREC on economic growth and CEI through rigorous econometric techniques. Based on the regression results, Shapley value decomposition is utilized to account for the cross-country inequalities of economic growth and CEI. The main findings are as follows: (1) There exist bidirectional Granger causalities between SREC, economic growth, and CEI, which shows there is a systematic link between the three variables. (2) All models demonstrate SREC negatively influences economic growth, indicating renewable energy deployment costs are urgent to be decreased with SREG increasing. Besides, capital investment and openness positively affect economic growth, but energy intensity has an opposite impact. (3) From the spatial heterogeneity perspective, the cross-country inequality in economic growth is primarily due to the regional inequality of capital investment, followed by energy intensity and SREC. By contrast, the impacts of labor and openness are negligible. (4) SREC has a negative effect on CEI. In addition, an inverted U-shaped nexus between economic growth and CEI is observed. Energy intensity positively affects CEI, while the impacts of urbanization and openness are insignificant. (5) From the spatial heterogeneity perspective, the cross-country CEI inequality is mostly caused by the inequality of energy intensity, followed by SREC, urbanization, and economic growth, while the contribution of the openness gap is little. This article provides important implications for low-carbon development in the BRI countries.

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Data availability

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

Notes

  1. The 28 BRI countries comprise Bangladesh, Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech, Egypt, Greece, Hungary, India, Indonesia, Iran, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russian, Singapore, Slovakia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam.

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Funding

This research was financially supported by Postgraduate Research and Innovation Key Project in Hunan Province (Grant No. CX20190717 and Grant NO. CX20200910).

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  1. School of Economics Management and Law, University of South China, Hengyang, 421001, People’s Republic of China

    Jianhan He, Jianhua Chen, Hengming Peng & HaiLin Duan

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  1. Jianhan He
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  2. Jianhua Chen
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection, and analysis were performed by Jianhan He, Hengming Peng, and Hailin Duan. Funding acquisition: Hengming Peng and Hailin Duan. Supervision: Jianhua Chen. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Jianhan He, and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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He, J., Chen, J., Peng, H. et al. Exploring the effect of renewable energy on low-carbon sustainable development in the Belt and Road Initiative countries: evidence from the spatial-temporal perspective. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 39993–40010 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-13611-4

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