Abstract
This paper scrutinizes the asymmetric impact of education and education expenditure on clean energy consumption and CO2 emissions in the BRICS economies using annual data for the period 1991–2019. The analysis employs a nonlinear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) framework. Findings unfold that a positive change in education contributes to increasing clean energy consumption in Brazil, Russia, India, and China. This finding implies that a negative change in education contributes to reducing clean energy consumption in Brazil, Russia, and India in the long run. Nonetheless, a positive change in education expenditure increased the clean energy consumption in Brazil, Russia, and India, while it has decreased in South Africa. On the dark side, a negative change in education expenditure degrades clean energy consumption in India, China, and South Africa in the long run. The asymmetric empirical results of CO2 emissions are mixed, economy-specific, and vary across group countries in the long run. We find that the education and education expenditure has long-run asymmetric effects in BRICS industries. Thus empirical findings give us robust policy implications for BRICS economies.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is one of the research results of “Research on Multidimensional Poverty Reduction Effect of Digital Inclusive Finance: Index Construction and Path Selection” the Key R & D Program (Soft Science Project) of Shandong Province (2020RKB01107). Thanks for the support of Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences) key teaching research project “Research on Cross Border Compound Talents Training Mode of Finance Major under the Background of New Liberal Arts” (2020zd12).
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This idea was given by Yanyan Liu. Yanyan Liu, Muhammad Tayyab Sohail, and Muhammad Tariq Majeed analyzed the data and wrote the complete paper, while Arman Khan read and approved the final version.
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Liu, Y., Sohail, M.T., Khan, A. et al. Environmental benefit of clean energy consumption: can BRICS economies achieve environmental sustainability through human capital?. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 6766–6776 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16167-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-16167-5