Changes in the economy and human conduct have contributed to one of today's most urgent challenges: environmental pollution. This study's overarching objective is to evaluate the following Next Eleven nations (N-11) ecological footprints (EF) with their natural resources (NR), economic complexity (EC), renewable energy (RE), and foreign direct investment (FDI). The data from 1995 to 2018 are used with the panel data estimations. The complexity of an economy is found to influence the EF. For this purpose, the cross-sectional autoregressive distributed lag method is appropriate. The analysis shows that a higher degree of economic complexity was associated with a larger ecological impact. Moreover, this correlation was the highest among all the variables considered. However, the consumption of natural resources and the economies' complexity enhance environmental conditions. The key recommendation from the study's conclusions is to improve R&D activities to build environmentally friendly technology and clean energy infrastructures and to change to a clean industry pattern. Meanwhile, strategic initiatives are offered to legislators depending on the stability of institutional quality.
Keywords: CS-ARDL; EF; Economic complexities; Institutional quality; Natural resources; Renewable energy.
© 2023. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.