Type of the article: Research Article
Abstract
Efficient regional public expenditure is critical for aligning decentralized economic development with renewable energy, energy security, and reconstruction priorities. This study aims to examine whether expenditure across selected regional budget programs is systematically associated with renewable energy development in Ukraine and whether these relationships remain robust across alternative temporal, distributional, and nonlinear specifications. The analysis uses a balanced panel of 25 Ukrainian regions for 2018–2021 and applies program-specific two-way fixed-effects models with CR2 standard errors, Benjamini–Hochberg adjustments, lagged and same-sample specifications, wild-cluster-bootstrap inference, presence–intensity decomposition, alternative transformations, winsorization, and formal quadratic tests. In the baseline capacity growth models, expenditure from local target funds (β = 0.9152, p = 0.0192) and electric transport measures (β = 0.1499, p = 0.0126) showed nominally positive associations, but neither survived multiplicity adjustment (q = 0.1054). Wild-cluster-bootstrap inference did not confirm these estimates, producing p-values of 0.4871 and 0.3597, respectively, while both programs were observed in only five region–year cases across two regions. No program coefficient was significant at the 5% level in the electricity production models; SME support produced the strongest negative estimate (β = −0.2152, p = 0.0580, q = 0.5995), whereas installed renewable capacity remained positively associated with production (β = 0.4108–0.4803, p = 0.0041–0.0220). Lagged, presence–intensity, transformed, winsorized, and nonlinear specifications provided no multiplicity-robust evidence, with formal U-test q-values no lower than 0.5789.
Acknowledgment
The authors acknowledge funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) [Grant No. IZURZ1_224119]. The authors bear sole responsibility for the conclusions and results of the research.