Renewable Energy Production, Energy Consumption and Sustainable Economic Growth in Turkey: A VECM Approach

There exists a highly interrelated relationship between energy, the environment and growth where the efficient management of this nexus is not only a must for sustainable development and human wellbeing but is also a basis for formulating sound economic policies harnessed with energy and environmental policies. Thus, this paper aims at investigating the causal relationships among renewable energy production, total energy consumption and economic growth for Turkey both in the long and short runs. The analyses are conducted by using the Johansen–Juselius co-integration test, the vector error correction model, Granger causality, impulse-response functions and variance decomposition for the period 1980–2016. Our findings obtained for the causal relationship between renewable energy and economic growth points to a bidirectional relationship both in the short and in long runs that promote feedback hypothesis, and it also reports a causal relationship running from energy consumption to economic growth both in the short and long runs, supporting the growth hypothesis. However, no consistent result could be obtained for the short run relationship from economic growth to energy consumption. These results indicate that increased renewable energy production and decreased energy consumption are vital for Turkey’s sustainable development.