Consolidating Sustainable Development in OECD Countries: The Role of Green Energy Transition, Green Innovation, Environmental Policy Stringency, and Human Capital

Sustainable development is a broad concept encompassing economic, social, and environmental factors. Thus, traditional development and environmental indicators offer an insufficient perspective since they fail to integrate education, health, income, and environmental issues cohesively. To overcome this, the study considers a comprehensive sustainable development index that accounting for material footprint, CO2 emissions, education, income, and health when measuring sustainable development. This research aims to evaluate, from 1990 to 2019, the effects of the transition to renewable energy, environmental policy stringency, green innovation, and human capital on sustainable development in 25 OECD countries by adopting novel estimators, such as the Cross-Sectionally Augmented Autoregressive-Distributed Lag (CS-ARDL) and Cross-Sectionally Augmented Distributed Lag (CS-DL) techniques. The results of the investigation show that green innovation and human capital promote sustainable development. In addition, renewable energy transition positively impacts sustainable development. However, the current environmental regulatory framework in OECD countries does not support sustainable development efforts. Finally, policies are directed toward green innovation and energy transition to encourage sustainable development in OECD countries.