An investigation into the anthropogenic nexus among consumption of energy, tourism, and economic growth: do economic policy uncertainties matter?

Abstract

Global warming has been a pressing issue for the past decade as various economic activities have been flagged and are expected to reduce emissions. While previous studies have examined the energy consumption-emissions-economic growth nexus in significant detail, attention is yet to be given to the role of economic policy uncertainties and human activities such as tourism in a carbon function. Thus, this study aims to investigate the long-run relationship between energy consumption, tourists’ arrivals, economic policy uncertainty, and ecological footprint in the top ten earners from international tourism over the period 1995 to 2015. The fully modified ordinary least square and dynamic ordinary least square estimation techniques and the Dumitrescu and Hurlin causality tests were used in the study. Empirical results suggest that economic policy uncertainties in addition to tourism and energy consumption are drivers of environmental degradation. However, the contribution of energy consumption to ecological footprint is significantly moderated by economic policy uncertainties such that a 1% increase in the latter reduces environmental damage by 0.71%. This study suggests that policy uncertainties matter a great deal for energy and environmental policies. Also, green economic growth is possible if the proper implementation of environmental protection policies can restrict the harmful impact of economic activities on the quality of the environment. Based on the empirical findings, vital energy policy recommendations are suggested.

Nexus between Economic Policy Uncertainty and Renewable Energy Consumption in BRIC Nations: The Mediating Role of Foreign Direct Investment and Financial Development

“…The nexus between economic policy uncertainty and energy consumption has been extensively investigated in literature [12,[23][24][25]. Existing literature suggests that uncertainties have two dimensions, i.e., geo-political risk and economic policy uncertainty (EPU), which critically induces the energy consumption and investment in energy diversifications.…”

An empirical investigation of tourism-led growth hypothesis in the European countries: evidence from augmented mean group estimator

“…The research scholars and economists have tested the tourism-growth hypothesis for the case of developing and developed nations (Liu et al 2015;Li et al 2018;Lanouar and Goaied 2019). Although tourism is argued to influence the environment (Adedoyin et al 2020a; Adedoyin and Bekun 2020), in a general sense, the tourism sector brings more foreign exchange revenue, which can be used in the import of capital goods for producing goods and services in objective to achieve higher economic growth. Notably, the tourism industry provides a remarkable part of the financing to host economy to import more than its exports.…”

Natural resource abundance and broad-based financial development nexus in ASEAN countries: accounting for globalization and human capital

“…It is always necessary to examine whether individual units in the panel are independent or not, as this will help to overturn biased estimates (Omojolaibi and Nathaniel 2020;Adedoyin et al 2020;Adeleye et al 2020). International treaties, trade agreements, and spillover effect are the possible causes of CD (Chudik et al, 2016); and the ASEAN countries have signed more than three hundred and fifty agreements after its inception, and are also signatories to various international agreements.…”