The conditional relationship between renewable energy and environmental quality in sub-Saharan Africa

This paper complements existing literature by assessing the conditional relationship between renewable energy and environmental quality in a sample of 40 African countries for the period 2002 to 2017. The empirical evidence is based on fixed effects regressions and quantile fixed effects regressions. The findings from both estimation techniques show that renewable energy consistently decreases carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Moreover, the negative effect is a decreasing function of CO₂ emissions or the negative effect of renewable energy on CO₂ emissions decreases with increasing levels of CO₂ emissions. In other words, countries with higher levels of CO₂ emissions consistently experience a less negative effect compared with their counterparts with lower levels of CO₂ emissions. Policy implications are discussed.