Panel estimation for renewable and non-renewable energy consumption, economic growth, CO₂ emissions, the composite trade intensity, and financial openness of the commonwealth of independent states

This article investigates the long-run and causal linkages between economic growth, CO₂ emissions, renewable and non-renewable (fossil fuels) energy consumption, the Composite Trade Intensity (CTI) as a proxy for trade openness, and the Chinn-Ito index as a proxy for financial openness for a panel of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) region including Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan over the period of 1992–2015. It is the first time that CTI and the Chinn-Ito indexes are used in an economic-pollution model. Employing three panel unit root tests, panel cointegration estimation methods (DOLS and FMOLS), and two panel causality tests, the main empirical results provided evidence for the bidirectional long-run relationship between all the variables in all 12 sampled countries except for economic growth-renewable energy use linkage. The findings of causality tests indicated that there is a unidirectional short-run panel causality running from economic growth, financial openness, and trade openness to CO₂ emissions and from fossil fuel energy consumption to renewable energy use.