The transformation of countries’ productive structures and improvements in environmental quality are of major concern worldwide and are important to realising sustainable growth. This paper examines the causal impacts of economic complexity on the ecological footprint of a worldwide representative sample of countries from 1995 to 2018. The methodology consists of utilising the Panel Corrected Standard Error and the Driscoll and Kraay (Rev Econ Stat 80(4):549–559, 1998) standard errors estimation techniques to establish the impacts and to assess the environmental Kuznets hypothesis; the log-t regression and club clustering algorithm developed by Phillips and Sul (Econometrica 75(6):1771–1855, 2007; J Appl Econom 24(7):1153–1185, 2009) to identify convergence clubs, and the Dumitrescu and Hurlin (Econ Model 29(4):1450–1460, 2012) panel non-causality statistic as a robustness check. Two steady states are identified as points of convergence for the sample of countries. The findings provide empirical evidence for the occurrence of an inverted U-shaped Kuznets environmental curve for the full sample and the two convergence clubs. Furthermore, the results show that at the 1% significance level, population density, renewable energy consumption, and the human development index have a negative and significant effect on ecological footprint. The overarching implication is that countries under investigation can decrease their ecological footprints through the enhancement of renewable energy sources, human development, and the implementation of import strategies that prioritise clean energy productive activities.
