Elsevier

Renewable Energy

Volume 139, August 2019, Pages 385-394
Renewable Energy

The roles of international tourism and renewable energy in environment: New evidence from Asian countries

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2019.02.046Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Linkages of emissions, GDP, energy use, tourism are examined in Asian countries.

  • Environmental Kuznets curves are tested based on individual and panel data.

  • Heterogeneous panel non-causalities are investigated based on panel data.

  • The impacts of tourism and renewable energy on emissions are mixed.

Abstract

Northeast and Southeast Asian region is one of the fastest growing regions in CO2 emissions, real GDP, energy consumption, and international tourism. However, the relationships among emissions, real GDP, energy consumption, and tourism are little known. The purpose of present paper is to explore the linkage among CO2 emissions, real GDP, non-renewable and renewable energy, and tourism in panel of ten Northeast and Southeast Asian (NSEA-10) countries covering the period of 1995–2014. Environmental Kuznets curves are examined by fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and augmented mean group (AMG) based on individual country and panel data. Moreover, heterogeneous panel non-causality test is employed to analyze the causality among variables based on regional data. The empirical results reject the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis in whole samples (NSEA-10), Northeast Asian countries (NEA-4), and Southeast Asian countries (SEA-6). Non-renewable energy is the big source of emissions, while renewable energy can reduce emissions in panel data. The development of tourism may lead to the environmental degeneration. The findings based on heterogeneous causality test are mixed in different regions.

Introduction

Climate change and global warming are affecting human life. The average temperature in the earth surface increased 0.5 °C taking more than 100 years (from −0.19 °C in 1880 to 0.31 °C in 1994). Shockingly, it makes such an “achievement” only using 20 years (0.9 °C in 2017).1 The main culprit of global warming is greenhouse gas (GHG), especially, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions [1,2]. But nowadays, the emissions have been alleviated by increasing utilization of renewable energy and the efficient use of energy [[3], [4], [5], [6]]. Renewable energy has experienced rapid worldwide development in the past few decades [7], which accounted for nearly 19.1% of global total energy use in 2013 and provided nearly half of all new power generation capacity in 2014.2

Tourism is an important sector for the growth of economy (10.2% of world economy in 2016) and job creation (10% of world jobs in 2016) throughout the world. Moreover, the contribution of tourism on GDP growth in 2016 is 3.1%.3 Although enriching national income, tourism is one of the significant contributors on emissions [8], which contributes nearly 5% of global CO2 emissions, including transportation sector (75%), accommodation sector (20%), and other sector (5%).4

Northeast and Southeast Asian (NSEA) regions are expected to be at two of the fastest growing regions, not only for their CO2 emissions and economic growth, but also for their energy consumption and international tourism. Fig. 1 presents the share of CO2 emissions, real GDP, non-renewable and renewable energy use, as well as international tourism in selected Asian countries in 2014. From the chart, we can get the share of each selected sector in global total. The percentage of carbon emissions and non-renewable energy is around 40%, while the share of real GDP and renewable energy is around 30%, and the international tourism contributes more than 15% of the global total. Individually, China contributes the most in this region, following with Russia and Japan, while in international tourism, the ranking is changed, following with Russia and Malaysia.

Recently, NSEA region has been experiencing a rapid growth in CO2 emissions, real GDP, energy use, and international tourism. However, little is known about the dynamic linkages among the above variables in the region. The aim of the present paper is to explore the linkages among the selected variables, which may enrich the existing literature in the regions. The main contributions are as follows: 1) This paper focuses on renewable and non-renewable energy use rather than the total energy consumption which is used in many previous papers. The development of renewable energy use is very remarkable in Asian countries, but the relationship among renewable energy, international tourism, and emissions is little known in this region. 2) We investigate causality in the complete sample (NSEA-10) and two separated regions (four Northeast Asian countries (NEA-4) and six Southeast Asian countries (SEA-6)), respectively. The results may better reflect the relationship among international tourism, energy consumption, economy, and environment in regions. 3) By using fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) [9] and augmented mean group (AMG) [10], environmental Kuznets curves (EKCs) are examined based on individual and panel data, which may have idiosyncratic characteristics on different countries and regions. 4) The latest causality test, named heterogeneous panel non-causality [11], is used to investigate the linkages among selected variables. 5) To our knowledge, this paper is the first study to analyze the linkages among CO2 emissions, GDP, non-renewable and renewable energy use, and tourism in the Asian region, which may enrich existing literature. Through this paper, the intention is to provide advice to the authorities.

The rest of this paper is structured as follows. Section 2 presents the literature review. Section 3 describes the empirical model and data, and Section 4 considers the empirical results and discussion. Section 5 offers conclusions and policy implications.

Section snippets

Literature review

The causality of CO2 emissions, renewable and non-renewable energy consumption have been extensively studied by numerous scholars over the last few decades, but the results are mixed (Table 1, A and B). Along with the growth of tourism and related industries, the relationships between tourism and other related variables are investigated by many tourism economists. Some studies investigate the linkage of tourism and economic growth (Table 1, C). By employing bivariate Vector Auto-regression

Empirical model

The goal of the present paper is to explore the linkages among CO2 emissions, real GDP, non-renewable and renewable energy use, and international tourism in a panel of ten Asian countries from 1995 to 2014. Following the model used by Zhang and Gao [37] and Dogan and Aslan [40], the relationship can be written as follows:COit=f(GDPit,GDPit2,NREit,REit,TOURit)Here, the natural logarithmic form of Eq. (1) is formulated as:LCOit=α0+α1LGDPit+α2LGDPit2+α3LNREit+α4LREit+α5LTOURit+εitwhere i, α, t,

Empirical results and discussions

In order to examine the relationship among CO2 emissions, real GDP, the square of real GDP, non-renewable and renewable energy use, and international tourism for a panel of ten Asian countries, the methodologies, such as panel unit roots, co-integration, and causality are employed. The detailed procedures are as follows.

Conclusions and implications

The present paper explores the relationship among CO2 emissions, real GDP, non-renewable and renewable energy, and tourism in panel of ten Northeast and Southeast Asian countries covering the period of 1995–2014. Environmental Kuznets curves are examined by FMOLS and AMG based on individual country and panel data. Moreover, heterogeneous panel non-causality test is employed to analyze the causality among variables based on regional data. The empirical results reject the existence of the EKC

Acknowledgments

This study is supported by the Humanities and Social Sciences Fund of Henan Province (No. 2019-ZZJH-331), the Soft Science Studies of Henan Province (No. 192400410095), and the National Project Fostering Fund of Luoyang Normal University (No. 2018-PYJJ-019).

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