A dynamic relationship between renewable energy, agriculture, globalization, and ecological footprint of the five most populous countries in Asia.

Abstract

This study aims to examine the impact of globalization, renewable energy consumption, and agricultural value addition on the ecological footprint of selected five most populous countries in Asia during the period 1975-2020. The Westerlund cointegration test supports long-term cointegration relationships among the considered variables in selected countries. The long-term resilience results of the second-generation cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag approach evidently demonstrate that agricultural value addition and globalization contribute significantly to the long-term ecological footprint of the five most populous countries in Asia. However, renewable energy consumption significantly reduces the ecological footprint. Moreover, the impact of economic growth on ecological footprint is significantly positive, while the square of economic growth had a significantly negative impact on ecological footprint, thus validating the inverted U-shaped environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis for specific Asian densely populated countries. The causality test results of Dumitrescu and Hurlin support the feedback hypothesis by showing a two-way causal relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth. There is also a two-way causal relationship between agricultural value added and ecological footprint. Strategically, specific densely populated countries in Asia should encourage clean energy production and consumption in the agricultural sector, and the adoption of environmentally friendly technologies can improve environmental quality and agricultural production.