Innovation, militarization, and renewable energy and green growth in OECD countries

• Published in: Environmental science and pollution research international Vol. 28; no. 27; pp. 36004 - 36017
• Main Authors: Sohag, Kazi, Husain, Shaiara, Hammoudeh, Shawkat, Omar, Normah
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Berlin/Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg 01-07-2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Aquatic Pollution; Atmospheric Protection/Air Quality Control/Air Pollution; Biomass; Clean energy; Earth and Environmental Science; Economic conditions; Economic development; Economic growth; Economics; Ecotoxicology; Energy; Environment; Environmental Chemistry; Environmental Health; Environmental science; Innovations; Interest rates; Renewable energy; Renewable resources; Research Article; Subsidies; Sustainable development; Technological change; Waste Water Technology; Water Management; Water Pollution Control; Militarization; O13; Innovation; Renewable energy; Interest rate; F64; P48; P18; P28; Green growth
• ISSN: 0944-1344; 1614-7499
• DOI: 10.1007/s11356-021-13326-6

Within a framework that includes economic activity, real interest rate, grants, and subsidies, we aim to explore the role of renewable energy, technological innovation, and particularly the environmentally damaging militarization in driving green growth, which fosters sustainable economic growth by ensuring the values of natural assets, considering OECD countries. Our examination affirms a positive proposition between the development of renewable energy, technological innovation, and green growth in the long run by implementing the cross-sectional dependency panel autoregressive-distributed lags (CS-ARDL) framework in a dynamic heterogeneous panel setting. The findings also suggest that militarization is antagonistic to green growth. Our decomposed analysis is compatible with our premier analysis, indicating a conducive impact of both biomass and non-biomass types of renewable energy on green growth. We also document a negative association between the real interest rate (RIR) and green growth, while income muddles the results. The robustness tests confirm the sensitivity of our main findings to the magnitude of the subsidies and grants provided to renewable energy. The paper concludes with several policy recommendations.