Do circular economy, renewable energy, industrialization, and globalization influence environmental indicators in belt and road initiative countries?

This paper is the first comprehensive research to examine the effect of circular economy on environment employing two environmental degradation indicators (CO₂ emissions, ecological footprint) and one environmental quality indicator (load capacity factor) for 57 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) countries during 2000–2019. The effect of other variables such as renewable energy, industrialization, and globalization was also controlled. The study applied the cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag method (CS-ARDL), the augmented mean group (AMG), and common correlated effects mean group (CCEMG) methods as a robustness checks. The empirical findings reveal that circular economy and renewable energy have pro-environmental effects by decreasing carbon emissions and ecological footprint and increasing the load capacity factor in BRI countries. However, industrialization and globalization have detrimental effects on the environment. The result of causality shows a bidirectional causality between renewable energy, circular economy, industrialization, and three environmental indicators, but the relationship of globalization with CO₂ emissions and the load capacity factor is unidirectional and with the ecological footprint is bidirectional. All the results are confirmed by the robustness tests. The study suggests policy implications for the BRI government.