Assessing technological innovation and sustainable environment: Tourism perspective of advanced panel methods

Abstract

The current study aims to analyze the influence of technological innovation, economic growth, tourism and renewable energy consumption on the carbon emissions in four South Asian economies covering the period 1990-2020. This study employed the cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag model–a the third-generation estimator as it tackles the issues of slope heterogeneity, panel cross-section dependency, endogeneity, and stationarity. Also, this study uses the augmented mean group as a robustness test and Granger panel causality heterogeneity test. The results display that economic growth significantly enhances emissions level, whereas achievement of the threshold income level significantly reduces environmental degradation–validating the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis in the region. Besides, tourism, renewable energy consumption, and technological innovation substantially reduces carbon emissions in the regions in short- and long-run. These findings are robust, and a bidirectional causal association exists between the explanatory variables and carbon emissions. The findings suggest policy concerning the adoption of renewable energy, considering industrial sector’s structural transformation, investment in technological innovation and promotion of tourism in the region.