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Phasing out fossil fuel dependency to adopt renewable energy technologies is pertinent for both ensuring energy security and for safeguarding the well-being of the environment. However, financial constraints often restrict the developing countries, in particular, from undergoing the renewable energy transition that is necessary for easing the environmental hardships. Against this background, this study makes a novel attempt to evaluate the impacts of FDI inflows on enhancing renewable energy use and attaining environmental sustainability in Bangladesh between 1972 and 2015. Using the autoregressive distributed lags with structural break approach to estimate the short- and long-run elasticities, it is found that FDI inflows enhance the share of renewable electricity output in the total electricity output levels of the country. Besides, FDI inflows are also evidenced to directly hamper environmental quality by boosting the ecological footprints figures of Bangladesh. Hence, it can be said that FDI promotes renewable electricity generation in Bangladesh but transforms the nation into a pollution haven. However, although FDI inflows cannot directly reduce the ecological footprints, a joint ecological footprint mitigation impact of FDI inflows and renewable electricity generation is evidenced. Besides, the findings also verify the authenticity of the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis in Bangladesh's context. Therefore, economic growth can be referred to as being both the cause and the panacea to the environmental problems faced by Bangladesh. These results, in a nutshell, calls for effective measures to be undertaken for attracting the relatively cleaner FDI in Bangladesh whereby the objectives of renewable energy transition and environmental sustainability can be achieved in tandem. In line with these findings, several appropriate financial globalization policies are recommended. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to scrutinize the validity of the greenhouse emissions-induced environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis, controlling for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) consumption, FDI inflows, and trade openness, in the context of six South Asian economies. Besides, the impacts of LPG use on both aggregate and disaggregated emissions of greenhouse gases are also evaluated. Using annual data from 1980 to 2016, the elasticity estimates from the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) regression analysis confirms the authenticity of the EKC hypothesis for Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, and Bhutan. In the cases of Pakistan and Nepal, economic growth, in the long-run, is evidenced to monotonically increase and decrease the greenhouse emissions, respectively. However, LPG consumption is found to homogenously reduce all types of greenhouse emissions in each of the selected South Asian nations. Moreover, in majority of the cases, statistical evidence of joint favorable impacts of economic growth and LPG consumption on the environment are ascertained. Furthermore, the Hacker and Hatemi-J bootstrapped causality analysis finds causal relationships between economic growth, greenhouse emissions, and LPG consumption. However, the causality estimates are found to be heterogeneous across the different South Asian nations considered in the analysis. The results, in a nutshell, denote that economic growth is both the cause and the solution to the greenhouse emission problems faced by the South Asian economies. Moreover, the results also assert that LPG can be a transitional fuel to reduce these emissions before the South Asian nations are ready to undergo transition from non-renewable to renewable energy consumption. Hence, the findings impose key fuel-diversification policy implications for the South Asian governments.