Clean energy-growth nexus in sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from cross-sectionally dependent heterogeneous panel with structural breaks

This paper examines the existence and nature of a causality relationship between clean energy consumption and economic growth for a panel of eleven sub-Saharan African countries over the period 1971–2007. We apply the panel unit root test that accounts for the presence of multiple structural breaks [13] and the newly-developed panel cointegration methodology which allows for cross-section dependence and multiple structural breaks [38] as well as a bootstrap-corrected Granger causality test. The estimation results show that there is cointegration between clean energy consumption and economic growth. Further, the results from the panel causality tests indicate that there is indeed a unidirectional Granger causal flow from clean energy consumption to economic growth.