Does Renewable Energy Convey Information to Current Account Deficit?: Evidence from OECD Countries

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The manuscript is sound and clear, and the proposed methodology as a framework sounds promising regarding the Renewable Energy Convey and Account Deficit. 

The following are my comments and questions regarding the manuscript:

1. Can the data be added to the latest data?

2. Please carefully check the mathematical formula representation of the model to ensure accuracy, such as the missing error term in formula (line 413).

3. Can you consider whether there is a spatial effect? What are the direct and indirect effects?

4. Is there endogeneity?

5. Appropriate descriptive and correlation analysis should be conducted on the data to see if these factors have a linear impact, otherwise linear models may not accurately depict their impact relationships.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Minor editing of English language required.

Author Response

Thank you so much for your valuable comments. We have addressed them, our responses are attached to the word file. Please kindly refer to the updated manuscript as well.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This paper proposes whether or not renewable energy conveys information to the current account deficit of selected OECD countries, using a Panel Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) estimator to determine the interrelation of current account deficit (CAB) as a percentage of GDP, with selected indicators.

 The topic is important, and the techniques seem interesting. However, I believe the authors should improve their work by considering the following suggestions.

1. The abstract is too long; it needs to be shortened.

2. Revise the introduction by including research questions. Particularly, the contribution part of the introduction section needs to be reformulated and improved to clearly reflect the paper's contribution. 

3. Replace section 2: An Overview of Selected Indicators for the Sample by section 3 literature review (and vice versa).

4. Presentation of equations and tables:

- The table descriptive statistics is missing. 

- All equations should be carefully revised, there are some problems in their presentations. Various mistakes can be easily seen.

5. The writing of the manuscript needs to be improved, and the author is recommended to avoid using very long phrases.

6. Conclusion restates the findings, which is inappropriate. It is recommended that authors use fewer sentences to sum up the findings and avoid repetition. Moreover, the limitations of the paper are ignored. I will suggest the author(s) to divide the last section into 7.1. Conclusion and 7.2 Policy Recommendation and 7.3 Limitations of the study. In its present form, it looks clumsy.

7. No justifications for the use of the econometric model (Why PMG? ), and it is recommended that authors add country by country-by-country short-run relationship.

8. What about perspectives for future research directions?

Overall, the study requires a comprehensive revision to cross the barrier to be published in such an esteemed journal.

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

Numerous errors (Missing Commas, Lack of Subject-Verb Agreement, punctuation, grammar, and usage). The paper should be cleaned by removing various kinds of mistakes.

Author Response

Thank you so much for your valuable comments. We have addressed them, our responses are attached to the word file. Please kindly refer to the updated manuscript as well.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

1-  Line 77-79. It would be appropriate for the authors of the article to substantiate the statement "However, progress has been quite uneven, with  large capacities have been built up in Europe and huge progress especially in the last decade happening in China." using literary sources.

2- Line 191-192. Quote "In the literature, studies focusing on current account balance are divided into 2 groups. "- What literature exactly?

 

 

Author Response

Thank you so much for your valuable comments. We have addressed them, our responses are attached to the word file. Please kindly refer to the updated manuscript as well.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear Authors,

Thank you for your thoughtful revisions. The manuscript has improved significantly, and I’m pleased to see that most of my previous comments have been addressed. I just have a couple of final suggestions:

For the statement "First, to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the relationship among these selected variables, specifically for selected OECD economies," I’d suggest either including references to back up this claim or rephrasing it to be a bit more cautious.

While the explanation for using the PMG model is clearer, it would be helpful to include some references to support the justification for choosing this model.

Overall, the manuscript is much closer to publication quality. My remaining suggestions are minor and mainly focused on fine-tuning the language and ensuring the technical details are consistently presented. With these last adjustments, I believe the paper will be even stronger.

Best regards,

Comments on the Quality of English Language

I recommend revising to simplify the language, shorten sentences, and ensure clarity throughout the manuscript.

Author Response

Thank you so much for your insightful comments. Please find attached the cover letter for our responses to the Round 2 comments. Please kindly refer to the track changes in the main manuscript. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf