Akın, Fatih; Özgün, Fergül

In addition to the views that claim that the development of information and communication technologies will result in less environmental pollution and better environmental quality, there are also views that claim that it will increase environmental pollution. In this study, the relationship between environmental quality and information and communication technologies for the 1995–2021 period for the Fragile Five countries was examined using the panel augmented autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds test method. Ecological footprint was used to represent environmental quality, and the proportion of individuals using the internet was used to represent developments in information and communication technologies. In addition, economic growth, energy consumption, and financial development are included in the model as explanatory variables. According to the results of this study, internet use reduces the ecological footprint in both the short and long run. While financial development reduces the ecological footprint in the long run, energy consumption increases both in the short and long run. Economic growth, on the other hand, increases the ecological footprint in the short run. In line with these results, expanding internet use in the Fragile Five Countries may increase environmental quality.

Cengiz, Orhan; Manga, Müge

Renewable energy policy is one of the remarkable parts of the sustainable development path. However, the polit-ical-economic dimension of renewable energy policies is not so much widely discussed. Besides, democracy and globalization are essential factors affecting renewable energy. Hence, this paper examines the relationship between renewable energy consumption, democracy, and globalization in the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) during the period 1995-2021. Economic growth and CO2 emissions are used as control variables in the model. The study employs the panel vector autoregressive (PVAR) estimation technique to quantify the relation-ship between renewable energy consumption, democracy, and globalization by including economic growth and CO2 emissions. The findings from the PVAR analysis suggest that participatory democracy and globalization pos-itively affect renewable energy consumption, while liberal democracy, economic growth, and CO2 emissions have a negative impact on it. Furthermore, the PVAR Granger causality test outcomes indicate an interactive causal relationship between variables.