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Renewable energy-economic growth nexus revisited for the USA: do different approaches for modeling structural breaks lead to different findings?

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A Correction to this article was published on 05 February 2022

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Abstract

It can be observed from the existing energy literature the previous papers investigating the influence of renewables consumption on GDP for the USA commonly ignore structural breaks in the US economy. Hence, the purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of renewable energy consumption on economic growth for the USA using quarterly data over the period 1977Q1-2019Q3 through unit root and cointegration methods based on different approaches in modelling structural breaks. Our empirical evidence confirms that all unit root tests give similar outputs and show all the variables become stationary at 1st differences. Besides, cointegration tests show highly different results in terms of the statistical significance of the coefficients. For instance, the cointegration test without structural breaks indicates that renewable energy consumption has no impact on economic growth. With sharp structural breaks in the cointegration approach, there is no cointegration between the variables. The empirical findings of the cointegration test with sharp and gradual breaks imply that renewable energy consumption has positive effects on economic growth. This paper discusses the implications of the empirical findings.

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Source: NC Clean Energy Technology Center (2020)

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Data availability

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

Change history

Notes

  1. See Shahbaz and Sinha (2019) for details about the curve and the literature.

  2. Bilgili et al. (2019) provide a broad empirical literature on the renewable energy consumption-economic growth nexus for other countries and country groups in the world.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Kirsehir Ahi Evran University, Kirsehir, Turkey

    Umit Bulut

  2. School of Management and Economics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China

    Muhammad Shahbaz

  3. Institute of Business Research, University of Economics, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Muhammad Shahbaz

  4. Institute of Business Research and CFVG, University of Economics, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

    Xuan Vinh Vo

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  1. Umit Bulut
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  2. Muhammad Shahbaz
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  3. Xuan Vinh Vo
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Contributions

Umit Bulut: conceptualization, formal analysis, methodology, project administration, writing—original draft. Muhammad Shahbaz: conceptualization, data curation, investigation, writing—original draft. Xuan Vinh Vo: supervision, validation, writing—original draft.

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Correspondence to Umit Bulut.

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The original online version of this article was revised: Muhammad Shahbaz is not affiliated to COMSATS University of Islamabad.

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Bulut, U., Shahbaz, M. & Vo, X.V. Renewable energy-economic growth nexus revisited for the USA: do different approaches for modeling structural breaks lead to different findings?. Environ Sci Pollut Res 29, 30134–30144 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-17684-z

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