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Abstract Hydrogen is considered a potential game changer for world energy systems and a solution to climate change concerns, as it generates zero waste and it is suited for power generation and transportation. Despite its several advantages, there are significant technical challenges in deploying a stable hydrogen economy including improving its process efficiencies, lowering production costs, maintaining cost-effective transmission and distribution, and exploiting inexpensive and sustainable feedstocks. In this context, a detailed study was conducted to analyze the production sources, technologies, storage and transport systems, and global potential exportable feedstocks to produce hydrogen. A comprehensive analysis of current hydrogen production technologies with their energy efficiencies and hydrogen selling prices was reported in this study. Various hydrogen production technologies with their capital investments and CO2 emissions were also presented. Potential feedstocks for hydrogen production were identified and analyzed through a product space model, which characterizes a network of global exportable products based on their similarities and productive knowledge. It was established that the hydrogen production feedstocks and sources currently used are primarily available in six countries: the United States of America, France, Russia, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Spain. Broadly, the results revealed that the United States of America and Russia shared the highest hydrogen feedstock exports, indicating a higher probability of hydrogen production in these countries. Except for Russia, all the studied countries fell in the most desired quadrant, indicating that they can move in all product space directions to exploit unexplored hydrogen feedstocks for better sustainable economic growth.

The relationship between exchange rate volatility (ERV) and other macroeconomic factors, including trade flows, domestic production, inflation, money demand, and economic growth, has remained a topic of a large number of studies in international finance. However, the research question that the past empirics have overlooked is whether ERV has any role in helping an emerging economy like China in its journey toward a renewable energy transition. To answer this question, this analysis intends to scrutinize the nexus between ERV and renewable energy investment (REI) in China over 1991Q1-2021Q4. Moreover, due to the asymmetric behavior of ERV, we have based our analysis on the asymmetric assumption. For analyzing the short and long-run impacts of ERV on REI in China, we used the linear autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and nonlinear ARDL methods. In the long term, the ARDL model predicts that stricter environmental policies and higher GDP will lead to more investment in renewable energy. As far as the nonlinear model is concerned, the long-term negative change in ERV does not affect REIs, whereas a long-term positive change in ERV reduces such investments. Likewise, unfavorable short-term exchange rate shocks encourage REI while positive short-term shocks discourage such development. Moreover, investment in renewable energy is bolstered by GDP, environmental policy strictness, and financial development, but is dampened by CO2 emissions in the short term in both models. On the basis of these results, we suggest that policymakers should consider implementing measures to stabilize exchange rates to promote investment in renewable energy.

The rapid growth of agriculture has led to a significant increase in energy utilization and CO2 emissions. Agriculture performs a pivotal role in improving every country’s economy. The current study has the main objective to analyses the long-run impact of agricultural CO2 discharge on economic growth, energy consumption (electricity utilization in the agriculture sector), financial development, foreign direct investment (FDI), and population for India. For the period 1978–2018, we applied ADF, PP, ERS, and KPSS unit root and Z&A and CMR structural interval tests to evaluate the stability and breaks in the data set. We check the cointegration of study variables through ARDL, Engle–Granger, and Johansen’s cointegration approaches. The findings of the long-run analysis showed a cointegration among the variables, which reveals that an escalation in economic growth and financial development refine the natural environment, while the upsurge in FDI and population further deteriorate the climate in India. However, agricultural sector electricity use shows an insignificant association with CO2 emissions for both periods. On the basis of results, we recommend that legislators should offer an environment that provides opportunities for financial development and economic growth.

One of the goals of developing a transport corridor is to promote socio-economic development by improving connectivity and sustainable transport operations, which largely depends on the operational strategy. Trade-off policies can be important tools for gaining the competitive advantage of road transport corridors, and thus, help facilitate sustainable growth and welfare. This article uses a case-based approach to observe the trade-offs in the first phase of transport infrastructure development, and then, in the second stage, further explores the trade-off variables in the transport operations strategy under the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). The results from the three cases of the parallel route system of the CPEC indicate that trade-off is an easily understandable and applicable method, which can foresee the operational gains or compromises for significant welfare of the regions. The implications of the trade-off are two fold, first is the “importance” of the trade-off, which is related to its impact on operational competitiveness. The other is the “sensitivity” of the trade-off, in terms of the change that will be caused to one variable when changing the other. The trade-off concept can be used for several landlocked transport corridors to achieve a competitive edge in transit trade.

Environmental degradation has put significant consequences at both the national and global levels. Economic development and ecological sustainability can be achieved by an increase in economic growth but on the cost of environmental quality. The basic aim of this analysis is to find the existence of the aviation Kuznets curve (AKC) and the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) for the selected 21 OECD nations from 1980 to 2018. The aviation cargo and aviation passengers’ patterns are separately analyzed in relation to CO2 emissions to quantify whether Kuznets phenomenon exists in the aviation industry of OECD nations? The econometric results of panel GMM confirm the validation of the aviation Kuznets curve in case of aviation passengers such that the “inverted U shaped” pattern. While the environmental Kuznets curve and aviation cargo Kuznets curve do not exist in the OECD nation. It means that an increase in aviation cargo and economic growth increases the CO2 emissions showing the “U shaped” association. Moreover, the Pairwise Dumitrescu Hurlin panel causality test exhibits uni–directional association moving from economic growth to carbon emissions, while there is bidirectional granger causality among trade openness, aviation sector, and energy consumption to carbon emissions. The overall results suggest that OECD nations must consider the pollution reduction techniques, investment in renewable sources, continuous research, implementation of efficient energy sources, and the imposition of aviation emissions taxes to limit the pollution.

Abstract This paper examines the relationship between hydroelectricity consumption and economic growth in China, while controlling for fossil fuel consumption, financial development, capital, institutional quality and globalization and its components for the period, 1970–2014. We have employed the Bayer and Hanck, (2013) combined cointegration test to examine the long-run relationships between those variables as well as the autoregressive distributed lag method with structural breaks as a robustness check. The empirical findings demonstrate a long-run relationship between those variables. Hydroelectricity consumption, fossil fuel consumption, capital, financial development and globalization and its components have a positive influence on GDP in China. The findings also provide predominant evidence on the long-run feedback hypothesis between the variables. The findings suggest that policies should be implemented to increase the role hydropower in the energy mix for sustainable economic growth in the country.

The importance of sustainable tourism in environmental literature is well documented, while there is a need to explore its different socio-economic and environmental factors that are helpful to promote sustainable development across countries. The objective of the study is to investigate the relationship between international tourism (ITOUR), energy demand (ED), carbon dioxide emissions (CO2), and economic growth (EG) by using a panel data of top 10 tourism-induced countries for the period of 1995-2016. The findings confirmed the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis in the panel of top 10 countries. Moreover, the results show that FDI inflows negatively influenced natural environment in the form of high mass carbon emissions, which supported "pollution haven hypothesis (PHH)." The energy demand escalates carbon emissions across countries. The study confirmed the feedback relationship between (i) tourism income (TI) and ED, and (ii) CO2 emissions and international tourism departures (ITD), while study supported the growth-led tourism income across countries. The study concludes that government(s) should have to focus on ecotourism policies and energy resources in a way to mitigate carbon emissions that is imperative for sustainable development across countries.

Fostering energy efficiency is one of the most effective ways to sustain economic growth while addressing climate change and limiting emissions. On the other hand, the pattern of international trade has changed many folds. The present study quantified the value-added trade (VAT) and developed a simultaneous equation model to empirically analyze the impact of value-added trade on energy efficiency in the global value chains (GVC). The Super-SBM model is used to estimate energy-efficiency. Empirical results indicate that India, Brazil, USA, Poland, France, Turkey, Israel, Italy are super-energy efficient, as their efficiency score is greater than 1. Secondly, value-added trade significantly improves energy efficiency by 0.434 after controlled the time and country effects. In addition, trade is divided into value-added exports and value-added imports to describe the internal trade mechanism, which depicts that the magnitude of the energy efficiency effect of value-added exports (0.011) is greater than that of imports (0.009). The findings also suggest that investment in R&D, foreign investment, and human education significantly improves energy efficiency. Foreign direct investment (FDI) positively increases the energy efficiency after controlled the unobserved fixed effects of country and year. It reflects the importance of the technology diffusion on increasing energy efficiency through FDI. Additionally, political regimes have also major impacts on both energy efficiency and value-added trade.

This study is an empirical investigation of dynamic causal interactions among energy investment, pollutant emissions, and economic growth in China. Three simultaneous equation models have been estimated by employing ‘one-step system’ as well as ‘one-step difference’ generalized method of moments (GMM) estimator for 30 Chinese provinces from 2005 to 2014. This study contributes by developing a hybrid model of economic growth to incorporate energy investment and pollutant emissions. First, the empirical investigation found bilateral positive causal relationship between energy investment and economic growth. Second, bilateral causality between energy investment and economic growth is found to be existent. Third, bilateral causality has been found between pollutant emissions and energy investment. The results are consistent across all the four study samples. Based on empirics, following implications are extracted, among others. The negative bidirectional causal linkage between energy investment and pollutant emissions implicated that investment in fuel-based energy directed to improve the quality of fuels and energy industry technology is likely to curb pollutant emissions. In turn, high level of pollutant emissions may stimulate policies to reduce investment in fuel-based energy industry. Finally, the positive bidirectional causal linkage between energy investment and economic growth implied that energy investment and economic growth tend to promote each other in China. The prominence of this relationship in eastern economic zone further suggested that energy investment is likely to become strongest driver of economic growth and vice versa in this region, which is followed by intermediate economic zone and western economic zone.