Christian Kyeremeh

Renewable energy usage is deemed a feasible panacea to environmental degradation and energy poverty. In pursuit of carbon neutrality, nations are obligated to formulate strategies that bolster renewable energy initiatives following the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. Given this, this article scrutinises the impact of financial development on the advancement of renewable energy consumption within the renewable energy- environmental Kuznets curve (REKC) framework while controlling for foreign direct investment (FDI), trade openness, governance and urbanisation using a panel of 38 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) nations from 2002-2019. The empirical findings based on the panel corrected standard error (PCSE) and the Feasible Generalized Least Squares (FGLS) models validated the REKC hypothesis for renewable energy consumption in the SSA region. Financial development, economic growth, trade openness, governance, and urbanisation have a substantial and detrimental impact on renewable energy consumption, whereas FDI has a neutral effect. The Dumitrescu-Hurlin causality tests demonstrate a bidirectional (feedback) causality between renewable energy consumption and all its determinants except for trade openness, where a unidirectional causality from renewable energy consumption to trade openness was established. Given these insights, our paper adds to empirical literature and provides incisive suggestions for policy formulation.

Following the outbreak of COVID-19 and its heavy toll on the global community and humanity, a fierce debate on the pandemic and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) performance nexus has emerged. While the literature on this subject remains highly contested, evidence within the Ghanaian contest is sparse. Thus, we present micro-level evidence on how COVID-19 poses a threat to hunger and poverty as SDGs in Ghana. Precisely, we examined the effect of COVID-19 on households' food insecurity and poverty and further analysed gender and locational sub-samples for differential effects. Data on 3905 households were obtained via concurrent online survey and telephone interviews. The results indicate that, on several occasions, a significant number of the sampled households (57.76%) did not get enough food to eat due to the pandemic. The proportion of households that went on several times without clean water for home use and access medicines/medical treatments were 50.52% and 52.22%, respectively. About 60.72% of the sampled households affirmed that, on several times, they did not have enough income due to the pandemic. At the same time, the share of households that suffered food insecurity due to the pandemic was 69.04%. Instrumenting for COVID-19 using distance to the affected communities, we find that a standard deviation increase in COVID-19 is associated with a rise of 0.232 and 0.289 standard deviations in poverty and food insecurity, respectively. Our results are robust to alternative estimation approaches to addressing the endogeneity of COVID-19 and other sensitivity checks. We conclude that Ghana would need to develop a new spectrum of gender- and location-sensitive policies that engender social inclusion as a conduit to expediate the attainment of zero poverty and hunger.