Abstract
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.
Does economic complexity matter for environmental sustainability? Using ecological footprint as an indicator