Impacts of institutional quality, economic growth, and exports on renewable energy: Emerging countries perspective.

In the present era, economic sustainability depends in many ways on energy security, and this is more applicable for the emerging countries of the world in the perspective of sustainability of their growth. To this end, the present study analyzes the impacts of institutional quality, economic growth, and exports on renewable energy consumption using panel data for 19 emerging countries from 2002 to 2019. This research is based on the panel PMG-ARDL approach and examines the long-run relationship among the variables. The panel co-integrated model has also been employed to cross-examine the result. The robust results of the empirical analysis show that institutional effectiveness, economic growth, and export growth have significant effects on renewable energy consumption. Unidirectional causal link is found from economic growth and export to renewable energy while renewable energy is unidirectionally linked to corruption control. This result provides valuable insights on how emerging countries should best focus on their institutions to make those more effective and corruption-free so that countries can sustain their economic growth with better exploration and utilization of renewable energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]