Empirical Evidence on the Impact of Technological Innovation and Human Capital on Improving and Enhancing Environmental Sustainability

Sinan Erdogan () and Guray Akalin
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Sinan Erdogan: Department of Economics, Hatay Mustafa Kemal University, Hatay 31000, Türkiye
Guray Akalin: Department of Economics, Kutahya Dumlupinar University, Kutahya 43000, Türkiye

Sustainability, 2025, vol. 17, issue 17, 1-17

Abstract: Conservation of the natural balance to hinder global warming is a contemporary task for policymakers. To this end, several policy tools have been proposed. Technological innovation, which increases productivity and aids in the development of eco-friendly technologies, and human capital, which fosters environmental awareness and provides knowledge of technology use, are among the policy options. Therefore, the primary aim of this study is to test whether human capital accumulation and technological innovation improve environmental sustainability in emerging countries by utilizing the recently proposed novel Cross-sectionally Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag method in ten of N-11 countries from 1996 to 2019. The empirical results suggest that economic development and human capital negatively impact environmental sustainability, proxied by the load capacity factor. In contrast, renewable energy has a positive impact on sustainable development. Lastly, empirical estimations using several technological innovation indicators uncover that technological innovation may have no systematic impact on the load capacity factor. Therefore, technological advances and human capital may not create the desired impact on environmental quality.

Keywords: environmental sustainability; load capacity factor; emerging countries; human capital; technological innovation; CS-ARDL (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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