This study focuses on the asymmetric relationship between categorical economic policy uncertainty indices and Japanese economic growth and renewable energy consumption from January 1987 to December 2021. Economic policy uncertainty has multidimensional effects on the global economy. To address non-linearity, Kernel-Based Regularized Least Squares (KRLS) and quantile-on-quantile regression (QQR) are applied to examine the impact of fiscal policy uncertainty, monetary policy uncertainty, trade policy uncertainty, and exchange rate uncertainty on economic growth and renewable energy consumption. The average KRLS results indicate that fiscal and exchange rate policy uncertainty negatively influence economic growth, while uncertainty in monetary and trade policy has a favorable impact in the long-term. A significant decrease in renewable energy consumption is attributed to increasing fiscal and trade policy uncertainty indices, whereas monetary and exchange rate policy uncertainty contributes to the enhancement of renewable energy consumption. The QQR results align with the KRLS findings, with a slight variation for monetary policy uncertainty, which was found to be negligible for economic growth across all quartiles according to QQR approach. Given the recent increase in economic policy uncertainty due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the Ukrainian conflict, our findings support several crucial policy recommendations for promoting economic development and renewable energy consumption in Japan.

Governments internationally strive to balance environmental health and economic development. Modern economies, specifically emerging ones, emphasize the importance of eco-friendly progress, where the pace of economic growth limits the ecological footprint. The ecological footprint denotes both the trajectory of natural resource extraction in the economic process and how quickly these resources can be replenished, as well as the capacity of the ecological sector to absorb waste from this process. This study examines 38 countries from 1994 to 2020 to investigate the drivers of the ecological footprint and found that environmentally related technologies harmfully influence ecological deprivation but are positively affected by gross domestic product growth. Renewable energy diminishes pollution levels, while urbanization has an insignificant effect. Imports were only found to be significant with one econometric technique, and their impact on the ecological footprint was positive. Income level affects the influence of gross domestic product on the ecological footprint. Lower-income quantiles have a more significant impact than higher quantiles. The Granger causality test shows bidirectional causality between the ecological footprint and exogenous factors: eco-technologies, gross domestic product/capita, renewable energy, urbanization, and imports.