Strategies to make renewable energy sources compatible with economic growth

摘要

AbstractThis paper focuses on the relationship between economic activity, and renewable and non-renewable energy consumption for the set of countries with the largest usage of each energy source. The dominance of one type of energy source could raise an unintentional barrier to a strategy of energy mix diversification. A panel of 28 countries was studied, using annual data for the time span 1995–2013. The ARDL approach was used to capture the short- and long-run effects. The Driscoll-Kraay estimator was used to attain robust results given the presence of the phenomena of heteroscedasticity, contemporaneous correlation, first order autocorrelation and cross-sectional dependence. Results suggest that renewable energy has not contributed to economic growth, while non-renewable energy has contributed. This finding should be incorporated in the definition of energy strategies, specifically by making renewable energy compatible with economic growth.Highlights?Traditional hypotheses of the energy growth nexus were tested.?Energy sources was separated in non-renewables and renewables sources.?Heterogeneous panel estimators and homogeneous estimators were confronted.?Driscoll-Kraay estimator is robust in the presence of cross section dependence.?The deployment of efficient policies on the renewable energy production are required.]]>