Changes in the economic structure and human lifestyle lead to environmental pollution, one of today's prime challenges. With this in mind, the main objectives of this study are to evaluate the impacts of economic complexity, natural resources, renewable energy consumption, and foreign direct investment on the ecological footprint in weak, medium, and high levels of institutional quality countries. This study is probably one of the first studies to examine the effect of the economic complexity on ecological footprint and classify countries based on their institutional quality levels. Furthermore, the interaction of economic complexity and natural resources is considered a new variable. For this purpose, the panel vector autoregressive model is used. The results revealed that economic complexity in all countries has a positive impact on ecological footprint, and also it has the greatest impact on ecological footprint among the considered variables. Conversely, the interaction of economic complexity and natural resources contributes to environmental quality. Notably, the impacts of study variables on ecological footprint are more robust in a medium level of institutional quality countries. According to the study's outcomes, the main recommendation is the R&D activities improvement to develop environmentally friendly technologies and clean energy infrastructure to improve environmental quality.
In the contemporary world, environmental degradation has become a concern for human beings. Accordingly, the impact of social welfare, economic policy uncertainty, natural resource rents, life expectancy, and trade openness are examined on ecological footprint (the most comprehensive proxy of environmental degradation) in 19 energy-intensive countries from 1997 to 2018. With this in mind, this study used the traditional panel ARDL and CS-ARDL approaches to evaluate how the study’s variables influence ecological footprint. Notably, the results of the CS-ARDL approach are more robust due to cross-sectional dependence and slope heterogeneity problems. The outcomes revealed that economic policy uncertainty and trade openness affect the ecological footprint negatively in the short run and positively in the long run. Moreover, social welfare degrades the environment in the long run, and natural resource rents improve environmental quality by mitigating the ecological footprint in the short run and harming the environment in the long run. Besides, life expectancy does not significantly affect ecological footprint in the long or short run. Meanwhile, the results confirmed the bi-directional causal relationship between the study’s variable and ecological footprint. Based on the outcomes, the way to adopt effective policies to improve the quality of the environment has been paved. Furthermore, a comprehensive policy framework for stricter environmental regulation is expected to be developed using the outcomes derived from this study.
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