Motivated by Morocco’s ambitious renewable energy targets and its commitments under the Paris Agreement, this study investigates the impact of renewable energy consumption (REC) on CO2 emissions over the period 2000–2020, while controlling for economic growth (GDP per capita), financial development (FD), domestic credit to the private sector and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach, we find robust evidence of cointegration among the variables. The results show that REC reduces CO2 emissions both in the short and long run, whereas FD and FDI increase emissions. Importantly, the inclusion of interaction terms (REC FD and REC FDI) reveals that higher renewable energy consumption mitigates the polluting impact of financial development and FDI. The robustness of these findings is confirmed by various diagnostic tests. Policy implications emphasize the need for green credit allocation, selective FDI screening, and a national energy observatory to align Morocco’s energy transition with its environmental goals.
Erraitab et al. (Thu,) studied this question.