Scholarlink

<p>Environmental sustainability remains a central policy challenge in advanced economies, where environmental regulation and technological efficiency interact in complex ways. This study examines the relationship between environmental policy stringency (EPS), energy efficiency (EEI), and ecological footprint across OECD countries over the period of 1990–2023. While prior studies often rely on homogeneous panel estimators, this analysis explicitly accounts for slope heterogeneity using the Mean Group (MG) estimator and complements this with diagnostics and robustness checks for cross-sectional dependence. The results show that improvements in energy efficiency are consistently associated with reductions in ecological footprint across baseline, robustness, and dynamic specifications. In contrast, the effect of environmental policy stringency is sensitive to model specification and country characteristics. Regime-based analysis shows that EPS is insignificant in low-efficiency countries but becomes significant in high-efficiency regimes. Income-based GDP specifications provide partial evidence consistent with an Environmental Kuznets Curve, although the turning point varies across countries. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of cross-country heterogeneity and identify energy efficiency as a key channel for reducing environmental pressure in OECD economies.</p>

错误：搜索内容不能为空，请输入英文关键词
错误：关键词超出字数限制，请精简
高级检索

Environmental policies and energy efficiency: its implications on ecological footprint among OECD countries

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年5月18日

查看全文
  • Michael Appiah

摘要

Environmental sustainability remains a central policy challenge in advanced economies, where environmental regulation and technological efficiency interact in complex ways. This study examines the relationship between environmental policy stringency (EPS), energy efficiency (EEI), and ecological footprint across OECD countries over the period of 1990–2023. While prior studies often rely on homogeneous panel estimators, this analysis explicitly accounts for slope heterogeneity using the Mean Group (MG) estimator and complements this with diagnostics and robustness checks for cross-sectional dependence. The results show that improvements in energy efficiency are consistently associated with reductions in ecological footprint across baseline, robustness, and dynamic specifications. In contrast, the effect of environmental policy stringency is sensitive to model specification and country characteristics. Regime-based analysis shows that EPS is insignificant in low-efficiency countries but becomes significant in high-efficiency regimes. Income-based GDP specifications provide partial evidence consistent with an Environmental Kuznets Curve, although the turning point varies across countries. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of cross-country heterogeneity and identify energy efficiency as a key channel for reducing environmental pressure in OECD economies.