Ecological impact assessment of green technological innovation under different thresholds of human capital in G20 countries

Under the globalized situation of environmental damage, increasing scarcity of resources, and uncertainty about their costs, challenges have been imposed for the saving of energy and inputs used, the transition to green energy and pollution reduction. Green innovation can be assimilated as a radical solution to meet these challenges and make the production process greener. The present study aims at examining the ecological effects of green innovation and the human capital by using the double-threshold model and the quantile regression method to the case of G20 over the period 1998–2017. Therefore, the objective of the study is to scrutinize the impact of environmental-related technology and the human facet on the ecological footprint (ECF), and to examine whether these effects are conditioned by the different thresholds of human capital index (HCI). The existing literature has not sufficiently analyzed these effects in the presence of different levels of environmental degradation and human capital, especially when human capacities and green technological innovation are integrated in a single model as mitigators of ECF. The results of the panel quantile regression revealed that the green technological innovation is an important mitigator of ECF whatever the level of environmental degradation of G20 economies. In addition, panel threshold technique disclosed that the positive repercussions of green innovation and human capital on environmental quality are only recorded above a threshold level of the HCI. Our findings revealed beside that the impact of lagged green innovation on the ECF are moderated by human capital, but only above a given threshold of human capital, which reflects that the latter plays an awareness-raising and non-functional role to reduce ECF when it is below the threshold level. The insights provided by this study can serve policy makers on actions that need to be directed with respect to green innovation and human capital development for global environmental policy tracers.