The transition to renewable energies in Tunisia: The asymmetric impacts of technological innovation, government stability, and democracy

Abstract

The current study is concerned with the analysis of the determinants of the transition to green energies in Tunisia with a focus on institutional and technological factors. In fact, it affords a deep assessment of the asymmetric effects of technological innovation, government stability, and democracy along with economic growth and non renewable energy on clean energy in Tunisia. The analysis actually covers the 1984/2020 period. Therefore, to perform such analysis the Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) approach along with the spectral causality is used. Actually, the political context is of great importance in Tunisia, because this country has been going through a political transitional stage since the 2010 revolution. The main upshots bring out that a positive variation in government stability has no significant effect on clean energy, however a negative variation decreases renewable energy by 0.521% and 0.535% in both the long and short run, respectively. Similarly, a negative variation in democracy reduces green energies. Moreover, regarding technological innovation, the results suggest that a positive shock boosts green energy while a negative one lessens it in the long run. Furthermore, a positive variation of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) positively affects green energy while a negative variation has a negative impact, in the long run. Finally, a positive shock on fossil fuel consumption decreases renewable energies and a negative shock positively affects them, in the long run. Moreover, the results of the causality confirm the presence of a one way causal link from renewable energy to government stability and GDP. In addition, there is bidirectional causality between democracy and renewable energy. Finally, there is a one way causal link from technological innovation and fossil fuel energy to green energy. Therefore, it is crucial that the political parties integrate environmental issues and mainly renewable energies in their political agenda. In addition, policymakers should encourage the creation of research centers devoted to renewable energies, which represent a link between scientific research and green energy industry.