<![CDATA[Financing will be relevant to investment attraction, labor market performance, electricity mix, and economic diversification in a hydrocarbon-dependent country like Iraq due to its ongoing electricity shortages. The present study offers the first quarterly, multi-outcome econometric evidence for Iraq, considering relationships between investment in renewable energy and four development indicators, namely net foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows, unemployment, fossil fuel dependency in electricity generation, and non-oil dependency in gross domestic product (GDP), based on 48 observations from 2013Q1 to 2024Q4. Complementary unit-root tests and structural-break tests were performed to estimate outcome-specific autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) models. The level relationships for all four equations were supported by exact small sample bounds tests. A 1% rise in renewable-energy investment led to a 0.00745-percentage-point rise in FDI, a 0.0110-point drop in unemployment, a 0.0111-point drop in fossil-fuel electricity dependence, and a 0.0208-point increase in the share of non-oil GDP. The error-correction coefficients varied between −0.539 and −0.914, which suggests that the adjustments were statistically supported and were moving towards equilibrium. The focal short- and long-run coefficients remained important following the procedures of Benjamini–Hochberg adjustment and Newey–West inference, while heteroskedasticity was observed in the unemployment equation, and the FDI robustness specification needs to be harmonized. The results from the Toda–Yamamoto tests revealed the predictable and partly bidirectional relationship between renewable investment and FDI and non-oil share from the project's start time. The results do not reveal cause-and-effect policy impact, but rather the stable equilibrium associations, and they emphasize the role of data provenance and shock-dependency in the inference process to understand conflict-affected economies.]]>
