Energy Consumption - Economic Growth Nexus in Vietnam: An ARDL Approach with a Structural Break

Energy and energy consumption play an important role in strategies for socio-economic development of the country. In 1995, Vietnam officially entered the 500 kV North-South transmission power line exploits, with a full length of 1,487 km. The purpose of this study is to investigate the breakpoint and the transition effect of energy consumption to economic growth in Vietnam during the period of 1980-1994, and 1995-2016. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach and the Bounds test are used to test for the presence of cointegration, whereas the Toda and Yamamoto procedure Granger causality test is used for the direction of causality. The result of the Bounds test validates the existence of cointegration among the included variables. The empirical results provide evidence that energy consumption has a positive impact on the economic growth of Vietnam in the long run. The causality test shows that there is bi-directional causality between energy consumption and economic growth, supported feedback hypothesis. There is a breakpoint in 1995 and the contribution of energy consumption in economic growth in the period of 1995-2016 is lower than the stage 1980-1994. This study suggests Government authorities explore new sources of energy to achieve sustainable economic development in the long run.