| Summary: | Countries all over the world especially the developing economies of sub-Saharan-Africa (SSA) are facing a major challenge of striking a stable path between economic and environmental sustainability. In this paper therefore, we examine the nexus between renewable energy, real GDP, emissions of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and gross fixed capital formation in SSA countries. To achieve this objective, we apply the technique of panel auto regression distributed lag (PARDL) to a panel data of selected SSA economies11 The 28 selected sub-Saharan African countries are: Benin Republic, Burundi, Burkina Faso, Botswana, Cameroun, Congo DRC, Congo Republic, Gabon, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Mauritania, Mauritius, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sudan, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Seychelles, Chad, Togo, Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. spanning from 1990 to 2018. Results from the analysis confirm the presence of a significant long run relationship between economic growth, renewable energy, emissions of GHG and gross fixed capital formation. On the economic pillar of sustainability, the findings indicate that renewable energy and real gross fixed capital formation exert positive and significant impacts on long run growth of SSA countries. Furthermore, the environmental pillar of sustainability results show that real GDP and real gross fixed capital formation exert positive and significant impacts on emissions of GHG while renewable energy exerts negative and significant impact on emissions of GHG. We further apply the Granger causality technique pioneered by Dumitrescu and Hurlin (DH), (2012). Findings from the analysis show that long-run feedback effects exist between real GDP, renewable energy and gross fixed capital formation; unidirectional causality runs from renewable energy to CO2 emissions. We draw inference that the impacts of renewable energy on SSA's growth is positive while the impact of renewable energy on SSA's emissions of GHG is negative. This implies that the application of renewable energy sources is a dependable path for the achievement of both economic and environmental sustainability and subsequently the achievement of vision 2030 in SSA countries.
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