Linking economic growth and ecological footprint through human capital and biocapacity

By S. Hassan, Muhammad Awais Baloch, N. Mahmood, Jianwu Zhang. Sustainable cities and society, 2019

572 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract As an indicator of environmental degradation, the ecological footprint has seen immense attention in the literature. However, because of the complex feedback in the relationships among economic development, biodiversity, ecosystem services, and human wellbeing, the footprint remains poorly understood and largely neglected in political decision-making. This study examines the relationship between economic growth and the ecological footprint as it relates to biocapacity and human capital. The autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) econometric approach with a structural break is applied to data from 1971 from 2014 to reveal that economic growth increases ecological footprint that contributes to environmental degradation. In addition, biocapacity also increases the ecological footprint and contributes to environmental degradation. A causality analysis suggests there is no causality regarding the relationship between economic growth and the ecological footprint.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3a61479868ba3b6edb111641344188b0ed05da65

Citations in the corpus

• Income inequality, human capital, natural resource abundance, and ecological footprint in ECOWAS member countries (2021, unknown): “Conventionally based on the average years of schooling and return to education, human capital defines the skills and knowledge required to enhance a person ’ s productivity (Hassan et al., 2019).”