The assessment of clean power and textile manufacturing on environmental quality: the case of Chinese economy

The main objective of this study is to contribute to the ongoing debate on the key factors of environment sustainability by inspecting the linkages between economic growth (GDP), carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions, renewable energy consumption (RE), non-renewable energy consumption (NRE) and the share of value added in the textile manufacturing sector (TEXL) in China by employing the autoregressive distributed lags (ARDLs) over the period 1998–2017. Our findings are promoting and proved that, in the short term, environmental degradation in China is negatively correlated with economic growth and textile value added and positively correlated with their lagged values. However, in the long term, non-renewable energy consumption boosts environmental degradation, while CO₂ emissions are negatively correlated with any fluctuations in GDP and TEXL. More importantly, Granger causality empirics confirm the presence of a one-way linkage from TEXL to CO₂ emissions, GDP, RE, and NRE. Thus, we recommend that policy makers in China must pay more attention to textile manufacture as well as spurring RE through the implementation of environmental taxes and the subsidy of green energy consumption.