There has been concern that economic globalization will increase energy consumption and reduce energy efficiency. A slew of studies investigating this assertion have used trade, foreign investment, or both as indicators of economic globalization, with mixed findings. A number of concerns challenge the empirical literature including measurement issues, infrequent temporal variations in the data, business cycle effects and heterogeneity bias, which affect the causal ability of economic globalization.

This study answers an important policy question related to energy efficiency transition tendencies and the role that control of corruption and regulatory quality can play, using the Stochastic Frontier and Panel Markov-Switching techniques with panel data from 46 African countries. We have demonstrated in this study that African countries have been locked in a low energy-efficient state, with tendencies to transition out considered low to moderate with a 21-24% chance and more likely in the long term (i.e., after a decade).

Achieving energy literacy is now considered both a necessary and sufficient condition to ensure strict adherence to energy conservation/efficiency programs. While the existing literature has considered the energy literacy level of different end-users, a gap exists in the literature on energy literacy levels of faith-based organisations and how they impact energy conservation in faith-based organisations.

This study contributes to the literature on whether financial development stimulates technical energy efficiency (TEE) or not, by addressing core biases that creep into the relationship and thereby reducing the ability to draw causal inferences from financial development to TEE. Our approach is based on the instrumental stochastic frontier technique, where biases in the frontier and inefficiency equations are dealt with using external instrumental variables.

The Sustainable Development Goal 7 seeks universal access to energy, substantial increase in the share of renewable energy and doubling of energy efficiency efforts. The success of these targets most likely depends on maximizing, where they exist, positive synergies or trade-offs with other development outcomes. Studies investigating the relationship between energy efficiency and (un)employment remain inconclusive and mainly focus their analysis on the energy-supply side, neglecting the demand side.

The literature on the impact of electricity access are generally inconclusive. Potential causes include geographical differences, limited external validity (due to the focus on small-scale projects) and self-selection bias (due to not accounting for observed and unobserved heterogeneities) of some studies. Moreover, a large part of the literature on energy-gender nexus addresses between-gender instead of within-gender disparity, which is considered relevant because socio-economic characteristics do differ within a particular gender group.

There is a close connection between energy and development outcomes. Therefore, energy constraints could adversely influence development outcomes. Consequently, building resilience to energy constraints could be one effective channel to improve development outcomes. This study analyses the effect of energy poverty, while considering the influence of green energy transition, on several development outcomes.

This article estimates the effect of financial development on electricity consumption for economies with above and below mean human capital index in 45 African countries. The study applied the simultaneous system GMM estimator (adjusted for cross-sectional dependence) and the Aiken and West slope difference test. We performed further robustness checks, such as sample sensitivity analysis to address potential outlier problem. The result showed that the total effect of financial development on electricity consumption is negative, but the direct and indirect effects are different.

This study examines the effect of finance on energy efficiency in Africa, addressing two fundamental empirical issues in the energy-finance literature: (1) simultaneous modelling of efficiency estimates and determinants of efficiency and (2) two-way endogeneity problem with income and financial depth. I apply the endogenous stochastic frontier method. Life expectancy at birth instruments for income while religion, latitude of capital city and legal system origin instrument for financial depth.