Varieties of capitalism and renewable energy in emerging and developing economies

Abstract

To better understand renewable energy uptake in emergingeconomies, we develop a typology of capitalism for 54 middle-income countries and use Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to test the Varieties of Capitalism (VoC) theory to illustrate which type of capitalism produced successful or unsuccessful renewables projects in these states. We find that even when the VoC approach is properly specified for developing states, it only explains about 44% of the outcome. Despite this, four causal pathways of combined economic institutions from the VoC theory were found to be sufficient for explaining this phenomenon, but liberal institutions performed poorly in each case.