Do renewable energy and national patents impact the environmental sustainability of Tunisia?

This study is focused on analyzing the linkage between carbon dioxide (CO) emissions, renewable energy consumption (RE), foreign direct investment (FDI), national patents (NP), exports (X), imports (M), and gross domestic product (GDP) in Tunisia by using the time series data from 1980 to 2017. A unit root test and an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model were applied to avoid bias caused by data mismatch and autocorrelation of time series data. Elasticity long-run test shows that renewable energy consumption, exports, and gross domestic product have a positive impact on CO emissions, while foreign direct investment acts negatively on CO emissions. Depending on the error correction term test, there is a long-run causality: from CO emissions, renewable energy, foreign direct investment, exports, and gross domestic product to home patent. Findings of the short-run causality show that there is a unidirectional causality running from exports to CO emissions and from exports to gross domestic product. Our results also show that Tunisia should encourage foreign direct investment because it seems to be an important factor in the mitigation of CO emissions.