Does financial development reinforce environmental footprints? Evidence from emerging Asian countries

In the preceding two decades, the expansion of financial services has played a vital role in pursuing economic growth agendas in the developing Asian nations. However, its harmful effect on environmental quality cannot be denied. In this backdrop, in the present study, we investigated whether the financial sector development moderated the ecological footprint, carbon footprint, and land footprint in the eight developing nations of South and Southeast Asia from 1990-2015. In doing so, we included the per capita income, energy solutions, and trade expansions as determinants of the ecological indicators. The results of the second-generation unit root tests and Westerlund’s cointegration test reported the long-run stability and cointegration, respectively. To navigate the possible cross-country dependency, we employed the cross-sectional augmented autoregressive distributed lag approach (CS-ARDL). The results confirmed that per capita income, energy solutions, trade expansion, and financial sector development invigorated the ecological footprint, carbon footprint, and land footprint in the long run. Further, it is reported that the development in the financial sector has a significant moderating impact on the nexus between energy and environmental footprints. In other words, the financial sector development drove the association between the overall environmental quality and energy solutions in the long run. Similarly, we observed that the financial sector development worked as a significant mediator between environmental proxies and trade expansion. By including the ecological footprint, carbon footprint, and land footprint as environmental proxies, the study provides the wider environmental spectrum. Based on the outcomes of the study, we proposed a novel scheme, which may help to address the harmful environmental impacts of the financial sector development in the selected developing nations.