Renewable energy consumption, clean technology trade and agricultural productivity in Africa

This study examines renewable energy consumption, renewable energy technology trade, and agricultural productivity relationships across 53 African countries (1995–2023) using cross-sectional augmented distributed lag (CS-DL) estimation with 4 productivity measures: Solow residuals, agricultural output per capita, output per worker, and stochastic frontier efficiency. Results reveal that renewable energy consumption generates mixed long-run effects on productivity (coefficients: − 0.95, + 1.60, − 0.99, and − 0.16 across the four productivity measures, respectively), while renewable energy technology trade exhibits consistently negative effects (− 0.37, − 1.83, − 0.36, and − 0.13). However, their interaction produces uniformly positive effects (0.10, 0.36, 0.10, and 0.03), confirming essential complementarity between domestic adoption and international technology transfer. Robustness analyses reveal substantial heterogeneity; low productivity countries demonstrate interaction coefficients of 0.00007–0.0002 compared to high productivity countries’ 0.00000014–0.0002. Renewable energy adoption follows discrete patterns with 87.3% of growth concentrated in 10% of episodes, characterized by threshold effects and complementarity requirements. Coordinated renewable energy and technology transfer policies overcome individual negative effects and generate substantial productivity gains (0.03–0.36 coefficient range), while isolated interventions prove counterproductive. Policy effectiveness depends fundamentally on initial technological capacities and development stages, requiring context-specific rather than uniform continental approaches. African renewable energy policy must simultaneously address supply-side capacity building and demand-side technology acquisition through integrated frameworks facilitating technology spillovers from high to low productivity countries.