Pathways to securing environmentally sustainable economic growth through efficient use of energy: a bootstrapped ARDL analysis.

Oman has traditionally relied upon natural gas and oil for meeting its domestic energy demand. As a result, despite growing economically, the level of carbon dioxide emissions in Oman has persistently surged; consequently, the nation has failed to ensure environmentally sustainable economic growth. Against this background, this current study aims to explore the impacts of energy consumption, energy efficiency, and financial development on Oman's prospects of attaining environmentally sustainable growth over the 1972-2019 period. The estimation strategy is designed to take into account the structural break issues in the data. Using the carbon productivity level as an indicator of environmentally sustainable economic growth, we find long-run associations amid the study variables. Besides, higher energy consumption and greater financial development are found to impede carbon productivity while improving energy efficiency is observed to boost carbon productivity in Oman. Therefore, it is pertinent for Oman to consume low-carbon and energy-efficient fossil fuels, improve energy efficiency levels, and green its financial sector to achieve environmentally sustainable growth.

Decarbonization pathways: the roles of foreign direct investments, governance, democracy, economic growth, and renewable energy transition.

The Paris Agreement has united the global nations to embark on pathways to the decarbonization of their respective economies. However, the objective of achieving low-carbon growth is not as straightforward as it seems since the rapidly emerging and fossil fuel-dependent world economies are focused on expediting economic growth at the expense of poorer environmental consequences. Against this background, this study aims to explore the effects of foreign direct investments, governance, democracy, renewable energy use, and economic growth on carbon dioxide emissions in the context of the BRICS countries over the period from 2006 to 2017. The estimation strategy involved in this study specifically accounts for addressing the issues of cross-sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity in the data set utilized for analysis. The associated findings reveal cointegrating associations between the study variables. Besides, the regression outcomes reveal that good governance (achieved by controlling corruption) and strong democracy (achieved by ensuring greater freedom for journalists) help to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the long run. More importantly, the results also confirm that both good governance and stronger democracy further reduce carbon dioxide emissions by mediating between emission-inhibiting effects of foreign direct investment inflows in the BRICS countries. In addition, good governance and stronger democracy exert moderating effects to reduce the emission-stimulating impacts associated with higher economic growth. Lastly, it is also witnessed that forgoing non-renewable energy use and adopting renewable energy instead help to curb the carbon dioxide emission levels further. Accordingly, considering these key findings, it is recommended that the BRICS countries should enhance the quality of governance and democracy, attract clean foreign direct investments, promote renewable energy use, and adopt clean economic growth strategies to decarbonize their respective economy.

The environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis for Bangladesh: the importance of natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, and hydropower consumption.

Mitigating environmental pollution has become a global agenda keeping the sustainability of socioeconomic and environmental development into cognizance. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to evaluate the authenticity of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis in the context of Bangladesh; particularly controlling for different types of energy consumption including coal, natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, refined petroleum oil, and hydropower. The results from the robust econometric analysis, accounting for multiple structural break concerns in the data, authenticate the validity of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. Besides, the predicted economic growth thresholds are found to be higher than the current level which indicates that Bangladesh is still at a development phase where the nation is trading-off environmental deterioration for economic expansion. Moreover, the results also show that consumption of coal and refined petroleum oils increase emissions of carbon dioxide and aggregate greenhouse gases while higher consumption of natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, and hydropower are seen to abate these emissions. Thus, in line with these findings, it can be asserted that both natural gas and liquefied petroleum gas can function as transitionary fuels to mitigate environmental pollution in Bangladesh before the nation can completely undergo renewable energy transition. Hence, these findings impose key policy takeaways concerning energy diversification and environmental sustainability in Bangladesh.