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The intermittent effects of renewable energy on ecological footprint: evidence from developing countries

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Abstract

This paper examines the relationship between renewable, non-renewable energy, natural resources, human capital, and globalization on ecological footprint from 1990 to 2016 for developing countries. We apply Westerlund co-integration technique to check the long-run relationship among the variables. The long-run elasticity of the model is analyzed through MG, AMG, and DCCE. For the robustness check of the long-run relationship among the variables, we use FMOLS and DOLS approach. The direction of causal relationship is determined through Dumitrescu and Hurlin causality test. Our findings revealed that economic growth, non-renewable energy, natural resource, and urbanization are inducing the ecological footprint of developing countries and reducing the environment’s quality. To cope up with this situation, developing countries are bound to use more fossil fuel energy. The use of non-renewable energy consumption leads to increase the extraction of natural resources like coal and oil. However, renewable energy reduces the ecological footprint or improves environmental quality. Similarly, human capital and globalization have negative effects on ecological footprint. The results of causality test reveal that there are feedback effects between ecological footprint with economic growth, globalization, and natural resources. This study suggests that these developing countries should focus more on the investment in the renewable energy sector, improve quality education, and make stringent environmental policy for protecting the nations from ecological issues.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Editor-in-Chief and Editor, Prof. Eyup Dogan, and anonymous referees of the journal for their extremely useful suggestions for the improvement of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are available in the World Development Indicators (2020). Links: https://databank.worldbank.org/source/world-development-indicators#.

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  1. Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Institute of Technology Rourkela, Rourkela, Odisha, 769008, India

    Malayaranjan Sahoo & Narayan Sethi

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  1. Malayaranjan Sahoo
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  2. Narayan Sethi
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All the authors contributed to the study conception and design. Malayaranjan Sahoo and Narayan Sethi performed material preparation and data collection, and Malayaranjan Sahoo performed analysis. Both the authors wrote the first draft of the manuscript; and Narayan Sethi commented on previous versions of the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Malayaranjan Sahoo.

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Appendix

Appendix

Table 10 Sample countries considered for the study
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Sahoo, M., Sethi, N. The intermittent effects of renewable energy on ecological footprint: evidence from developing countries. Environ Sci Pollut Res 28, 56401–56417 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-021-14600-3

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