Modelling the dynamic linkages between eco-innovation, urbanization, economic growth and ecological footprints for G7 countries: Does financial globalization matter?

The linkages between natural resources, human capital, globalization, economic growth, financial development, and ecological footprint: The moderating role of technological innovations

Fossil fuel-dependency has induced a trade-off between economic growth and environmental degradation across the developing nations in particular. Against this backdrop, this study aims to evaluate the impacts of renewable energy use on the ecological footprints in the context of four South Asian fossil fuel-dependent nations: Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. The econometric analysis involves the use of recently developed methods that account for cross-sectional dependency, slope heterogeneity, and structural break issues in the data. The results reveal that renewable energy consumption reduces the ecological footprints while nonrenewable energy use boosts the ecological footprints. The results also confirm the validity of the environmental Kuznets curve and pollution haven hypotheses for the panel of the South Asian nations. Besides, foreign direct investment inflows are found to degrade the environment while higher institutional quality improves it. Furthermore, unidirectional causalities are run from overall energy use, economic growth, and institutional quality to ecological footprints. At the same time, bidirectional associations between foreign direct investment inflows and ecological footprints are also ascertained. The overall findings highlight the pertinence of reducing fossil fuel-dependency, enhancing economic growth, restricting dirty foreign direct investment inflows, and improving institutional quality to ensure environmental sustainability across South Asia.

Renewable Energy Use and Ecological Footprints Mitigation: Evidence from Selected South Asian Economies

This study aims to examine the impact of economic growth, financial openness, trade openness, and energy intensity on the ecological footprint of BRICS countries for the period 1996–2016 in the framework of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). In the research phases, the effects of financial openness and trade openness on ecological footprint were examined both individually and as a whole using three models. The results indicate that the EKC hypothesis is not valid in all BRICS countries. Specifically, the individual results demonstrate that the EKC model using financial openness is valid only for India, while the EKC model using trade openness is valid both for India and South Africa. Furthermore, financial openness has reduced environmental pollution in India and South Africa. Trade openness has reduced environmental pollution in China and India, while it has increased in South Africa. Lastly, energy intensity has increased environmental pollution in all countries except Russia for both models. Overall, policy-makers should develop policies to reduce energy intensity in BRICS countries.

The influence of financial openness, trade openness, and energy intensity on ecological footprint: revisiting the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis for BRICS countries.

The Southeast Asian countries have experienced significant degrees of economic growth over the years but have not managed to safeguard their environmental attributes in tandem. As a result, the aggravation of the environmental indicators across this region casts a shadow of doubt on the sustainability of the economic growth achievements of the Southeast Asian countries. Against this milieu, this study specifically explores the influence of renewable electricity generation capacity, technological innovation, financial development, and economic growth on the ecological footprints in five Southeast Asian countries namely Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam during the period 1985–2016. One of the major novelties of this study is in terms of its approach to assess the renewable energy use-ecological footprint nexus using the renewable electricity generation capacity as an indicator of renewable energy use in the selected Southeast Asian nations. The econometric analysis involves methods that are robust to handling cross-sectional dependency and slope heterogeneity issues in the data. Accordingly, the recently developed Cross-sectional Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag estimator is used to predict the short- and long-run impacts on ecological footprints. The major findings suggest that higher renewable electricity generation capacity and technological innovation reduce ecological footprints, while higher financial development and economic growth increase the ecological footprints. Therefore, these findings imply that in forthcoming years, the selected Southeast Asian countries will need to tackle the environmental adversities by enhancing their renewable electricity generation capacities, increasing investment in technological development, greening the financial sector, and adopting environmentally-friendly growth policies. Hence, the implementation of relevant policies, in this regard, can be expected to ensure complementarity between economic growth and environmental welfare across Southeast Asia.

The influences of renewable electricity generation, technological innovation, financial development, and economic growth on ecological footprints in ASEAN-5 countries

This study stabs to probe the impact of financial development, urbanization, trade openness, political institutions, and energy consumption on the ecological footprints (EF), within the framework of EKC, of 110 countries congregated by income levels, over the time span of 1996–2016. The final outcome of cross-sectionally weighted Panel EGLS and multi-step A-B GMM evidently reinforced the existence of EKC hypothesis in case of EF both in developed and less-developed countries. This study finds the destructive environmental impact of composition effect and energy consumption while political institutions, trade openness, and urbanization have constructive environmental effect. Financial development reduces the human demand on nature only in less-developed countries. The ultimate consequences of this study are equipped with several policy recommendations for the concerned authorities.

Catechizing the Environmental-Impression of Urbanization, Financial Development, and Political Institutions: A Circumstance of Ecological Footprints in 110 Developed and Less-Developed Countries

M. Aslam Chaudhary

Papers

Catechizing the Environmental-Impression of Urbanization, Financial Development, and Political Institutions: A Circumstance of Ecological Footprints in 110 Developed and Less-Developed Countries