Drivers of Environmental Performance in Asian economies: Do natural resources, green innovation and Fintech really matter?

The enhanced production and usage of automobile adversely effect environment and nature. Although, economies are putting major efforts to address the issue by incorporating sustainability practices, however, there exists a gap in existing literature on sustainable practices that are more crucial to empower economies in order to improve their environmental performance. Besides, environmentalists' interest has diverted to fintech advancement which however accelerates electricity consumption. Thus, further assessment in financial area is imperative to evaluate its cost and benefits to establish strong regulatory reforms aiming to mitigate climate change. Since, the existing studies present conflicting outcomes regarding fintech and environmental performance. By employing the data over period from 2018 to 2021, the article used panel of Asian economies to observe the impact of green innovations, green economic recovery, natural resource abundance, and Fintech on sustainable environmental performance. Estimations such as MMQR, DOLS, FMOLS and FEOLS are employed to observe the effect in automobile sector and it is revealed that climate change technologies and green recovery injects growth in environmental performance. Interestingly, fintech and natural resource abundance have an inverse effect on environmental quality due to high carbon emissions. The revelation of the study is an interesting piece of evidence to be probed further. Besides, study also promote the fact that for better sustainable performance, government and institutions must facilitate corporations with green innovation to gain further development of green products.