The role of tourism and renewable energy towards EKC in South Asian countries: fresh insights from the ARDL approach

Abstract

Over the last few decades, it has become a hot topic that countries are getting economic growth by reducing air quality. This study is an attempt to find out the impact of economic growth (GDP), tourism (TO), and renewable energy (RE) in Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka in the context of EKC (Environmental Kuznets curve). This study utilized the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to present empirical results. The stationarity of all the variables was confirmed by the unit root test at first difference. The positive coefficient value of GDP and negative coefficient value of GDP square show the EKC existence in Pakistan and India. But in India, this association is not significant. The empirical results also endorsed the findings of past studies that RE is improving air quality by mitigating CO2 emissions in Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Nepal. The findings show mixed results regarding the tourism impacts on CO2 emissions. The positive coefficient of tourism in Pakistan and Nepal implies that tourism is improving the air quality in these countries. Whereas, the negative coefficient of tourism in Sri Lanka and India indicates that tourism is stimulating the CO2 emissions in these countries. Therefore, these countries need to launch RE resources in the tourist sector to reduce its adverse impacts.

Keywords

• Tourism
• renewable energy
• South Asian countries
• EKC
• GDP