Green economic growth, cleaner energy and militarization: Evidence from Turkey

This study examines the role of cleaner energy, technological innovation and militarization on green economic growth (GEG) under different economic conditions in the context of Turkey. To this end, we apply Autoregressive Distributed Lags (ARDL) under the assumption of symmetric and asymmetric adjustment approaches to analyse a time series data over the period 1980–2017. We initially examine GEG by adding merit goods and deducting natural resources depletion, the damage of carbon emissions and other particulate emissions impairments from gross domestic product (GDP). Our analysis demonstrates that cleaner energy and technological innovation are driving factors in promoting GEG in the long-term. Militarization is found to be detrimental for GEG in the Turkish economy in the long run. The research further finds that the impacts of cleaner energy, technological innovation, militarization and population density on GEG follow an asymmetric adjustment in the long run. Our findings provide important policy implications for promoting GEG in Turkey. •This study assesses the impact of cleaner energy, technological and militarization on green economic growth in Turkey.•Cleaner energy is a driving factor in promoting green economic growth.•Technological innovation fosters green economic growth.•Militarization is detrimental with green economic growth.