Green innovation and ecological footprint relationship for a sustainable development: Evidence from top 20 green innovator countries

Abstract

The ecological pressure of humanity on the planet measured by ecological footprint has been enlarging, which upsurges environmental threats. At this point, green innovation emerges as an optimal solution to sustainable development which brings together economic growth and environmental protection. This paper explores the nexus between green innovation and ecological footprint for the case of the top 20 green innovator countries. As a comprehensive environmental sustainability indicator, the ecological footprint is employed to observe the environmental impacts of green innovation. We apply cross-sectional dependence tests, panel unit root tests and panel cointegration tests covering the period of 1993-2016. The results show that economic growth is the primary reason for environmental degradation while urbanization does not have a statistically significant effect. Renewable energy consumption has a moderating influence on ecological footprint. More importantly, environment-related technologies have a statistically significant effect on ecological footprint. Specifically, a 1% increase in environment-related technologies leads to a 0.129% decrease in ecological footprint. The findings of the study clearly demonstrate that it is possible to achieve economic growth while protecting the environment. The results of the study are expected to be motivating for countries' transition toward green innovation in that sustainable development can be achieved if countries invest in green innovation.

Race to achieving sustainable environment in China: Can financial globalization and renewable energy consumption help meet this stride?

“…The authors found that REN mitigates carbon emissions while GDP enhances carbon emissions. The study of Pata, [38][39][40] Yilanci and Pata, 41 Ulucak and Yucel, 42 Koseoglu et al, 43 and Kirikkaleli et al 44 supports these results. For a study done in the UK, Adebayo et al 45 investigated the role of GDP, NREN, and REN on CO 2 emissions by using the monthly dataset spanning between February 1, 2020, and April 2021.…”

Extra‐regional trade and consumption‐based carbon dioxide emissions in the European countries: Is there a carbon leakage?

“…This does not conform to that of Danish et al (2020) and Aluko et al (2021). However, this insignificant nexus may be explained by the offset mechanism as discussed by Koseoglu et al (2022): The urbanized locations with high population density have higher production and income, which may scale up CCEpc by stimulating the consumption of energy and emission‐intensive products. However, especially in developed countries, better infrastructures and smart city implications with efficient waste management and recycling initiatives may limit CCEpc .…”

“…However, using the fixed effect panel threshold estimations in the case of 27 industrialized countries (including most European countries) over the 1991–2016 period, Aluko et al (2021) found that both population and urbanization had a negative association with the ecological footprint. Besides, the results of Koseoglu et al (2022) showed that urbanization did not have a statistically significant effect on the ecological footprint for the panel of top 20 green innovator countries (including 13 European countries) over the 1993–2016 period. The affluence is conventionally proxied by gross domestic product (GDP) per capita.…”

“…The existing literature has been largely dominated by the STochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence, and Technology (STIRPAT) modeling developed by Ehrlich and Holdren (1971) and reformulated in a stochastic version by Dietz and Rosa (1997). For the T A B L E 1 Greenhouse gas emissions (GHGE) inventories of the European countries population effect, population growth and urbanization are widely considered (Do gan et al 2021;Aluko et al 2021;Koseoglu et al 2022), while the impacts of technology are generally modeled by the adoption and production of high-tech products, development of environmental technologies, eco-innovations, and level of research and development investment (Fernández et al 2018;Park et al 2018;Danish et al 2019;Bashir et al 2020 andDanish et al 2020;Ma et al 2022). Most of the relevant studies reflect the environmental impacts of affluence by examining the nexus between economic growth and carbon emissions (Cheng et al 2018;Bekun et al 2019;Gardiner and Hajek 2020;Ren et al 2021),…”

Green economic development under the fiscal decentralization system: Evidence from china

“…Yang et al (2020) found that fiscal decentralization predisposes local governments to a preference for "scale over innovation" in fiscal investment, which inhibits local governments' innovation functions. However, technological innovation is an important support for ecological improvement (Koseoglu et al, 2022). Therefore, some studies have explored the role of fiscal decentralization in affecting ecological performance from the perspective of technological innovation and found that fiscal decentralization leads to the distortion of local government incentives, inhibits the government innovation function, and further inhibits energy performance (Lin and Zhou, 2021b).…”