Role of Energy Consumption on the Environmental Impact of Sectoral Growth in Malaysia

Although some studies have posited that sectoral growth could influence environmental pollution through energy consumption, the issue has not been explicitly and empirically investigated in the carbon-neutrality literature. Hence, this analysis fills the gap in the extant literature by employing the interaction models to ascertain the moderating role of energy consumption on the environmental impacts of the industrial, agricultural, financial, and service sectors in Malaysia. It also analyzes the marginal effects of sectoral growth on environmental pollution (i.e., ecological footprint and carbon emissions) at various levels of energy consumption. The Autoregressive Distributed lag technique utilized in this study found that the variables are cointegrated. The empirical estimations reveal that energy consumption plays a harmful moderating role on the impacts of the industrial and financial sectors on environmental pollution but does not aggravate the environmental impacts of the agricultural and service sectors. Besides, the marginal effects of the industrial and financial sectors on environmental pollution increase as the level of energy consumption rises in Malaysia. Based on the findings, this study highlights the policy implications and options.JEL Classification: Q53, O13, O14