Encirclement of Natural Resources, Green Investment, and Economic Complexity for Mitigation of Ecological Footprints in BRI Countries

Environmental deterioration has been increasing constantly for many years and has become the major reason for climatic changes. Consequently, policy makers and researchers are enquiring into the factors affecting environmental quality. The earlier literature describes little about the impact of economic complexity, natural resources, and green investment on ecological footprint for countries participating in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), so this research is an effort to close this gap for the 45 BRI countries covering the time period 1995-2020. We applied a number of methods to address the issue of cross-sectional dependence, then cointegration is determined through the Lagrange multiplier bootstrap method. The Driscoll-Kraay standard error method is employed to find the long-run estimates while the robustness of the estimated findings is checked through panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) and feasible generalized least squares (FGLS). The estimated outcomes suggest a significant negative effect of green investment on ecological footprint while natural resources, economic complexity, economic growth, and globalization have significant and positive effects on ecological footprint. These conclusions provide profound insight into natural resources, green investments, and economic complexity for sustainable development of the environment in BRI participating economies and provide a meaningful reference for ecological safety for other economies in the world. This study also highlights some necessary insights for policy makers and practitioners engaged in obtaining the target of sustainable development policies.