Nexus Between Renewable, Non-Renewable, Nuclear Energy Consumption and Economic Growth in Five Developing and Developed Countries: A Cobb–Douglas Production Function Analysis

This paper estimates an extended Cobb–Douglas production function for five major economies (China, the EU, India, the Russian Federation, and the USA) over the period of 1990–2023, incorporating electricity production from renewable, non-renewable, and nuclear sources as discrete production inputs. To capture complex properties in time series, a comprehensive econometric strategy is adopted, which combines linearity tests, multiple detection of structural changes, linear and nonlinear unit root tests, autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing for cointegration, error correction modelling, and error correction model (ECM)-based Granger causality. The results confirm the presence of mixed orders of integration, nonlinear dynamics, and structural instability across countries, justifying the use of the ARDL framework. The bounds test reveals a long-run cointegrating relationship between output, capital, labour, and energy inputs in all five economies. Long-run elasticities differ significantly across countries, highlighting strong structural heterogeneity. The short-term dynamics show that energy shocks have asymmetric and country-specific effects on output, while the error correction terms confirm convergence towards the long-run equilibrium, with the fastest adjustment observed in the EU and the slowest in the US. The causality results support the hypothesis of growth-led energy in China, India and the Russian Federation, while two-way feedback is observed in the EU and the US. These findings suggest that energy policy cannot be uniform across countries and must be aligned with domestic production structures, technological intensity, and energy transition stages.