Renewable energy consumption — financial globalization-tourism nexus with nonlinearity and cross-sectional dependence during Asia’s carbon-free transition

Adopting renewable energy consumption is one of the most important aspects of international efforts to combat climate change, improve energy security, and encourage the shift to a more robust and sustainable energy system. Therefore, the empirics and policymakers worldwide are searching for factors that can promote renewable energy consumption. This analysis intends to investigate the role of financial globalization and tourism on renewable energy consumption in Asia and sub-regions such as Central Asia, East Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and West Asia. The analysis utilized the linear and nonlinear CS-ARDL methods. Long-run outcomes of the linear and nonlinear models confirm that a rise in financial globalization and tourism promotes renewable energy consumption in Asia and all sub-regions. However, the nonlinear model highlights that a fall in financial globalization hurts renewable energy consumption in Central and South Asian regions, and tourism only hurts renewable energy consumption in Asia. In addition, ICT, GDP, and GHG emissions help promote renewable energy consumption. These results suggest that Asian policymakers must increase collaboration in the financial sectors and promote sustainable tourism in the regions to promote renewable energy consumption.