Modeling the effect of disaggregated renewable energies on ecological footprint in E5 economies: Do economic growth and R&D matter?

In recent decades, environmental degradation due to economic activities has become a severe concern for policymakers. Therefore, emerging economies do not exclude from this issue. The analysis about determinants of environmental degradation has become an increasing research direction, but researchers have not yet answered clearly. The present study provides novel empirical analysis to fill this gap by considering the impact of production-side disaggregated renewable energies with growth and R&D expenditure on ecological footprint. This study adopts the panel dynamic Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) alongside Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FMOLS) to estimate the long-term association among selected variables in selected five emerging economies over the period of 1990 to 2019. The empirical result shows a positive and significant impact of economic growth on environmental degradation (ED). Subsequently, the outcomes indicate that increasing production of geothermal and hydro energy causes to rise in ED. Moreover, it finds that increasing energy production by nuclear and wind sources reduced the ED. Such outcomes are fascinating when energies have different behavior with ED due to some hurdles, i.e., its cost and R&D. Additionally, this study finds that expenditures on R& D have a positive and significant impact on the ecological footprint in selected economies as a 1% rise in R&D expenditures declines the environment quality by 0.075% and 0.082%. The estimated results also provide important policy implications for the selected and the other emerging economies in designing an appropriate way forward to a sustainable environment.