Investigating the linkage between Renewable Energy Consumption and Economic Growth: The case of Turkey

The study purposes to investigate the relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth in Turkey using annual data covering the period 1990–2014. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model is applied and the findings suggest existence of a long run relationship among the variables. The ARDL long run estimation results discovered that renewable energy consumption has a positive and significant effect on economic growth. The results from the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) reveals that there is a unidirectional causality flowing from economic growth to renewable energy consumption without feedback. This findings bring a fresh perspective for policy makers for long run and sustainable economic development in Turkey