Does green investment mitigate environmental degradation in Vietnam: the time-frequency effect of nonrenewable energy investment and globalization?

Abstract

PurposeAccelerating the green economy’s transition is a practical means of lowering emissions and conserving energy, and its effects on the greenhouse effect merit careful consideration. Growing environmental deterioration has compelled decision-makers to prioritize sustainability alongside economic growth. Policymakers and the business community are interested in green investment (GRE), but its effects on social and environmental sustainability are still unknown. Based on this, this study aims at looking into the time-frequency interplay between GRE and carbon dioxide emissions and assessing the impacts of economic growth, financial globalization and fossil fuel energy (FUE) usage on this nexus in Vietnam across different time and frequency domains.Design/methodology/approachThe authors employ continuous wavelets, cross wavelet transforms, wavelet coherence, Rua’s wavelet correlation and wavelet-based Granger causality tests to capture how the domestic variance and covariance of two-time series co-vary as well as the co-movement interdependence between two variables in the time-frequency domain.FindingsThe results shed new light on the fact that GRE will increase the levels of environmental quality in Vietnam in the short and medium run and there is a bidirectional causality between the two indicators across different time and frequencies. In addition, when the authors observe the effect of economic growth, financial globalization and fossil fuel energy consumption on this interplay, the findings suggest that, in different time and frequencies, any joined positive change in these indicators will move the CO2 emissions-GRE nexus.Practical implicationsPolicymakers and governments can greatly benefit from this topic by utilizing the function of economic institutions in capital control of GRE and CO2 emissions and modifying the impact of GRE on the greenhouse effect by accelerating the green growth of economic industries.Originality/valueThe current work contributes to the current literature on GRE and CO2 emissions in several dimensions: (1) considering the sustainable development in Vietnam, by employing a new single-country dataset of GRE index, this paper aims to contribute to the growing body of research on the factors that influence CO2 emissions, as well as to provide a detailed explanation for the relationship between GRE and CO2 emissions; (2) localized oscillatory components in the time-domain region have been used to evaluate the interplay between GRE and CO2 emission in the frequency domain, overcoming the limitations of the fundamental time-series analysis; (3) the mediation role of economic growth, financial globalization and FUE in affecting the GRE-CO2 relationship is empirically explored in the study.