The role of green innovation and tourism towards carbon neutrality in Thailand: Evidence from bootstrap ADRL approach

The recent years have been marked by the role of green tech innovation in decreasing carbon emissions worldwide to attain the carbon neutrality target. Despite many studies examining the nexus between the former and energy consumption, tech innovation's effects on CO2 releases have not been extensively researched, and the extant empirical findings are often contradictory. Also, a major concern regarding the available literature is the scarcity of papers that scan the impact of tourism on carbon emissions, even though the industry has a high potential to affect ambient air pollution. In this case, the evidence is mixed, and no consensus among academics on the relationships between the two. Therefore, this study seeks to investigate the relevance of green innovation and tourism in decreasing environmental damage in Thailand based on the bootstrapping ARDL causality model suggested by (McNown et al., 2018). This specification includes a new cointegration feature and conventional ARDL bounds tests, which increases the power of the t- and of the f-test and has several advantages, being more adequate for dynamic models with more than one explanatory variable. Our findings reveal that green innovation and tourism lead to lower environmental damage by reducing CO2 emissions, similar to foreign investments and that green tech innovation improves the environmental quality via lower carbon emissions. •The study investigates the role of green innovation and tourism on CO2 emissions.•The study applied advanced econometric techniques.•Green innovation and tourism lead to lower environmental damage.•Foreign investments improve the environmental quality.•Green-tech innovation also helps to reduce CO2 emissions.