Essays on Energy Issues

In this era of economic advancements, global economies are suffering with significant energy issues, from fulfilling growing energy demand to protecting environmental health. The main objective of this PhD Dissertation is to highlight the energy challenges and explore how energy innovations, energy justice and environmentally friendly energy sources influence green growth processes. The first paper of this PhD Dissertation is titled Energy innovation and ecological footprint: Evidence from OECD countries during 1990–2018” and addresses the issue on the relationship among technological innovations in energy markets and environmental damage, which still receives contrasting views from the international debate. On the one hand, technological advancements in energy markets are seen as ‘solitary steps’ to tackle green growth; on the other hand, massive investments in research and development (R&D), as well as other financial mechanisms, are needed. The paper advances and contributes to the current literature because actual facts and figures motivate us to investigate the effects of ad-hoc socio-economic co-variates on a proxy of environmental degradation such as the ecological footprint, thus extending the majority of literature focusing on CO2 emissions. Second, the literature lacks in expoloring these relationships from the perspective of the sampled OECD countries. Lastly, to test the above relationships, the paper uses advanced econometric procedures. The second paper of this PhD Dissertation focuses on energy justice, which has emerged as a contemporary research agenda that pursues the integration of justice principles into energy policy. However, its role in achieving carbon neutrality goals remains undiscovered in academic literature. To address this gap, the paper builds a new energy justice index with the use of the entropy-based method and is aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 7 (equitable clean energy access), 10 (inequality reduction), and 13 (climate action), thus extending the 2015 work of Sovacool & Dworkin. Second, together with other socio-economic covariates, it infers CO2 emissions in 95 different income groups economies such as high-income, upper-middle-income, lower-middle-income, and low-income countries from 1996 to 2021. Finally, to test the above relationships, this second paper uses advanced econometric techniques such as the novel Method of Moments Quantile Regression. Although energy justice promotes fairness in the energy and socio-economic system, it does not address the growth aspects of societies. Green growth is a comprehensive approach that stimulates economic progress with ecosystem conservation. The third paper of this PhD Dissertation addresses the issue of green growth according to a spatial perspective. The novelty of this work is to extend the microeconomic firm-related PESTLE (political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental) framework (Francis Aguilar, 1967) to a macroeconomic perspective of green growth in 30 European economies from 1996 to 2021. The study also tests spatial dependencies and spillover effects through a Spatial Durbin Model. Main findings suggest that improvements in the home country’s institutional quality, financial development, human development, technological innovation, and environmental policy favour green growth in adjacent countries. The need of national regulations for energy infrastructures and cross-border collaborations for a renowned European industrial and energy policy are highly encouraged to favour green growth.