Environment sustainability through energy transition and globalization in G7 countries: What role does environmental tax play?

While the replacement of anthropogenic drivers of environmental degradation with green initiatives is increasingly becoming critical for achieving sustainable development goals (SDGs), the lack of clear understanding of the heterogeneity in relationship with ecological indicators is creating roadblocks to the implementation of efficient policy measures. In this study, the heterogeneous effects of energy transition, technological innovation (TI), globalization (GLOB), and environmental tax (ETAX) on ecological footprint (EF) for G7 economies are analyzed from 1994 to 2020. The robust method of moments quantile regression (MMQreg) is utilized to observe the various level of impact across multiple quantiles. The results highlight the statistically significant positive impact of non-renewable energy (NRE) on EF, while a significant negative effect of other independent variables is observed with varying levels across quantiles. The study's outcome upholds the accelerated adoption of renewable energy (RE) and TI, whereby environmental tax significantly contributes to restricting the malpractice of ecological degradation. Furthermore, the (Dumitrescu and Hurlin, 2012) [1] causality result revealed a unidirectional causal relationship between NRE and GLOB to ecological footprint. While a bi-directional causality exists between RE, TI, and ETAX to ecological footprint. The unique insight from the analysis helps in formulating important policy recommendations, which are then discussed in the final section.