Linking gold prices, fossil fuel costs and energy consumption to assess progress towards sustainable development goals in newly industrialized countries

Abstract

The continuous rise in global environmental challenges has led to urgency toward establishing a secure framework to achieve sustainable development goals. This study establishes a novel theoretical framework to analyze the role of energy prices, energy consumption, gold prices and economic growth on environmental degradation in newly industrialized economies. To realize sustainable development goals and foster environmental defence, this study utilizes CS-ARDL as the main econometric approach to investigate the asymmetric association between environmental degradation and relevant factors. We also use AMG, CS-DL, Driscoll-Kray and FGLS to enhance the robustness of our findings. Our econometric approach reveals that energy resource prices and renewable energy consumption reduce environmental degradation, while gold prices and fossil energy consumption elevate environmental pollutants. We also confirm the existence of the EKC hypothesis. The findings of our extensive analysis paved the way for a well-designed environmental policy for NIC economies should focus on renewable energy consumption, green investments, and structural changes.

Keywords

Gold prices / Fossil fuel costs / Renewable Energy Consumption / Environmental degradation / Newly industrialized countries / COP27

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Ningpan Chai: Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – original draft. Zhiqi Zhao: Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing. Xiaoke Li: Data curation, Formal analysis. Jun Xiao: Conceptualization, Funding acquisition, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Validation, Writing – review & editing. Zhangdong Jin: Validation, Writing – review & editing.

Declaration of competing interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by the Western Light-Key Laboratory Cooperative Research Cross-Team Project of Chinese Academy of Sciences (xbzg-zdsys-202309), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB40020502) and the Shaanxi Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (2020JC-030).

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