بازبینی رابطه رشد اقتصادی و مصرف انرژی های تجدید پذیر و غیر تجدید پذیر : شواهدی از کشورهای G7

The aim of this study is to investigate the long-run and causal relationships between renewable and non-renewable energy consumption and economic growth by using classical and augmented production functions, and making a comparison between renewable and non-renewable energy sources in order to determine which type of energy consumption is more important for economic growth in G7 countries for 1980–2009 period. Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach to cointegration was employed for this purpose. Also, causality among energy consumption and economic growth was investigated by employing a recently developed causality test by Hatemi-J (2012). The long-run estimates showed that either renewable or non-renewable energy consumption matters for economic growth and augmented production function is more effective on explaining the considered relationship. On the other hand, although bidirectional causality is found for all countries in case of classical production function, mixed results are found for each country when the production function is augmented.

Energy consumption and economic growth nexus is one of the most popular topics in the literature of energy economics (Ozturk, 2010 and Payne, 2010). One of the reasons behind focusing on this topic is that energy consumption shows considerable promise understanding the role of energy consumption in economic growth. At the first glance, the link between energy consumption and economic growth is clear. However, the empirical outcomes of the studies which investigate the relationship between these variables are sometimes inconsistent with each other. According to Ozturk (2010), using different data sets, alternative econometric methodologies and different countries' characteristics are the main reasons of this conflicting result. If one looks at the studies, it is seen that the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth is set around four different hypotheses (Apergis and Payne, 2009a, Apergis and Payne, 2011b, Bowden and Payne, 2010, Ewing et al., 2007, Lee, 2006, Ozturk, 2010, Payne, 2010 and Soytas and Sari, 2003): i) The growth hypothesis refers to a situation in which energy consumption plays a vital role in the economic growth process directly and/or as a complement to capital and labor. The growth hypothesis is supported, if uni-directional causality is found from energy consumption to economic growth. In this case, energy conservation policies aimed at reducing energy consumption will have negative impacts on economic growth. ii) The conservation hypothesis means that economic growth is the dynamic which causes the consumption of energy sources. The validity of the conservation hypothesis is proved if there is uni-directional causality from economic growth to energy consumption. In this situation, energy conservation policies which may prevent energy consumption will not have negative impact on economic growth. iii) The feedback hypothesis states a mutual relationship among energy consumption and economic growth. The feedback hypothesis is supported if there exists bi-directional causality between energy consumption and economic growth. In case of the validity of this hypothesis, energy conservation policies designed to reduce energy consumption may decrease economic growth performance, and likewise, changes in economic growth are reflected back to energy consumption. iv) The neutrality hypothesis indicates that energy consumption does not affect economic growth. The absence of causality between energy consumption and economic growth provides evidence for the presence of the neutrality hypothesis. In this case, energy conservation policies devoted to reducing energy consumption will not have any impact on economic growth. Another reason, which conducts researchers to focus on the link between energy consumption and economic growth, is the vision of sustainable development. The fact that many countries agreed on conserving energy and reducing CO2 emissions has increased the attractiveness of energy consumption related studies. However, the key dynamic in those studies is the consumption of renewable energy sources. With the growing importance of sustainable development, researchers have interested more in the effects of renewable energy consumption on economic growth and renewable energy sources have begun to be seen as one of the most important components in the total energy consumption of the World. In this regard, this study aims at investigating the long-run and causal relationships between renewable and non-renewable energy consumption and economic growth, and making a comparison between renewable and non-renewable energy sources in order to determine which type of energy consumption is more important for economic growth in G7 countries for 1980–2009 periods. The reason for choosing G7 countries as sample is that, G7 economies are the one who consumes 36.6% of World's total energy production, and causes 33.7% of World's total CO2 emissions, in average terms, over the period 2000–2008 (WDI, World Development Indicators 2012). The paper is organized as follows: Next section is devoted to the literature and novelty. Section 3 presents the data, methodology and results. Finally, Section 4 concludes.

This study aims at investigating the long-run and causal relationships between renewable and non-renewable energy consumption and economic growth, and making a comparison between renewable and non-renewable energy sources in order to determine which type of energy consumption is more important for economic growth in G7 countries for 1980–2009 period. In this study, recently developed Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to cointegration was employed for this purpose. In addition, the study employs recently developed causality test by Hatemi (2012) for investigating the causal relationships between renewable and non-renewable energy consumption and economic growth. Results show that the calculated F-statistics, except classical-renewable for Canada, classical and augmented-renewable for France, augmented-renewable for Germany and England, classical-renewable and non-renewable for Japan, represent cointegration relationship among variables in consideration. Moreover, significant negative error-correction parameters also confirm the existence of cointegration relationship for those samples. According to causal relationships between non-renewable energy consumption and economic growth that were estimated from augmented production function, there exists only one significant causal relationship between non-renewable energy consumption and economic growth. That is, the growth hypothesis is present for Japan indicating a short-run causal relationship from non-renewable energy consumption to economic growth. For other countries, findings provide the absence of causality between non-renewable energy consumption and economic growth. According to causal relationships between renewable energy consumption and economic growth that were estimated from augmented production function, there is no causal relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth in France, Italy, Canada and the USA; the feedback hypothesis is present for England and Japan, that is there exists bi-directional causality between renewable energy consumption and economic growth, and the conservation hypothesis is supported for Germany. According to causal relationships between renewable and non-renewable energy consumption and economic growth that were estimated from classical production function, the feedback hypothesis is supported for all countries. In other words, there exists bi-directional causality between non-renewable energy consumption and economic growth for each country. Results reveal that augmented production function is more successful on explaining the long-run relationship between energy consumption and economic growth in Canada, France, United States, England and Japan. This result implies a policy that, although each country needs to concentrate more on renewable and non-renewable energy consumption for higher real income levels; Canada, France, United States, England and Japan should invest in knowledge based production factors in order to benefit more from energy consumption.