Assessing the role of globalization on renewable energy consumption: New evidence from a spatial econometric analysis

With the increasing concern for energy security, strengthening international cooperation is regarded as one of the most crucial ways to promote the energy structure toward renewable energy. However, extant literature have seldom focused on the spillover effects of globalization on renewable energy consumption. Under this back-ground, this paper employs the spatial econometric model to explore the impact of globalization on renewable energy consumption in the panel data of 60 countries from 1995 to 2018. The empirical results confirm the spatial dependency of renewable energy consumption among countries. More importantly, the direct effect, spillover effect, and total effect of globalization on renewable energy consumption are all significantly positive, which indicates that globalization plays an important role in promoting renewable energy consumption and being surrounded by highly globalized countries could promote local country's energy transformation toward renewable energy. Furthermore, compared with economic globalization, the roles of political and social glob-alization in promoting renewable energy development worldwide are more pronounced. This research provides policymakers a novel insight into understanding the role of globalization in renewable energy development and helps to promote inter-regional cooperation on renewable energy development.