The trend and factors affecting renewable energy distribution and disparity across countries

Renewable energy plays a crucial role in clean energy transformation and emission mitigation. It's, therefore, necessary to understand the trend and factors affecting renewable energy distribution and disparity across countries. This paper investigates the development pattern of renewable energy worldwide. It depicted a distributional picture of the world renewable energy using a club convergence algorithm, to form 5 clubs with 78 economies based on the renewable energy generation during 2000-2018. China, the United Kingdom, and the United States are the top economies in renewable energy generation. And most of the economies are in the clubs with less renewable energy generation. With the Dagum Gini coefficient and decomposition method, it is found that the disparities of renewable energy between clubs are increasing, while the disparity within each club is decreasing. Affluence, demand for energy, technology level, industry and population structure are the factors determining the club according to the result of the ordered probit model and the fixed-effects panel regression model. Target recommendations are proposed for international policy formulations on renewable energy based on the results. (c) 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Automated summary

Renewable energy plays a crucial role in clean energy transformation and emission mitigation. This study investigates the global development pattern of renewable energy and reveals increasing disparities between clubs while decreasing disparities within each club. Factors such as affluence, energy demand, technology level, industry, and population structure are found to determine the clubs.