• Energy Research

This paper aims to evaluate the overarching relationships between International Inbound Tourism Demand (IITD), regional trade integration and Renewable Energy Transition (RET) in the context of selected South Asian economies between 1990 and 2016. The results from the panel data econometric analyses, accounting for cross-sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity issues, showed that higher degrees of intra-regional trade between the South Asian economies exert positive impacts on the IITD in South Asia. Similarly, undergoing a RET was found to stimulate the IITD further. Besides, the joint favorable impacts of regional trade integration and RET on South Asia’s IITD were also ascertained. Therefore, these findings impose key policy implications concerning the pertinence of strengthening regional trade cooperation between the South Asian neighbors and boosting renewable energy consumption for enhancing the IITD further.

Because 'border carbon adjustment (BCA)' may violate the presently operational National Emission Inventory (NEI) accounting practised under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which is based on territorial production-based emission reduction responsibility approach, this study intends to investigate the implications of BCA imposition on the exports from a developing country under a territorial consumption-based alternative framework. With this alternative framework of accounting, the study assumes the BCA-burdened developing country to implement 'domestic carbon adjustment (DCA)' measures and experiments by applying a static 'computable general equilibrium (CGE)' modelling. The result from this study indicates that the closer the rates of BCA and the DCA, the more effective the carbon adjustment schemes are to reduce the emission intensity of energy use. The stricter carbon adjustment measures also found changing the energy consumption pattern of productive sectors by inducing the emission-intensive sectors to switch towards low-emission intensive natural gas. The study recommends the implementation of DCA measures for a developing country as stricter as compared to the foreign standards in a consumption-based framework to make the carbon adjustment initiatives more effective.

Abstract This paper intends to explore the roles of a variety of income-related attributes of the problem of energy poverty which should be considered in the policy-making for alleviating various constraints for essential access of the people to useable energy. This inquiry scrutinizes the drivers of energy poverty in the settings of development stages by using the data of 190 countries grouped under low-income, middle-income, and high-income brackets from 1991 to 2019. For being a multifaceted issue, this study adopts the definition of access to modern energy facilities in the form of electricity consumption as a popular proxy for energy poverty. The empirical model conducts advanced panel cointegration methods i.e., panel ARDL based on pooled mean group and panel quantile regression. The findings of the study illustrate that the influence of different factors on access to electricity is heterogeneous along with the three panels of countries. The derived heterogeneity of employment, inflation, GDP, education, stock market returns and liquid liabilities over energy poverty is due to the diversified demographics of the low-income, middle-income, and high-income countries. The study found that the stage of economic development is a key factor in the determination of energy poverty, and this has important policy implications at the global level while accounting for the income attributes of the relevant countries.