Managing resource rents, trade openness, and energy transitions: Evidence on ecological load capacity from newly industrialized economies

Understanding how resource rents, trade structures, and energy transitions shape ecological sustainability has become a critical policy challenge for newly industrialized economies (NIEs). This study assesses how these structural drivers influence ecological resilience, measured through the Load Capacity Factor (LCF), across seven NIEs from 1990 to 2020. By explicitly justifying LCF as an integrated indicator capturing both ecological pressure and biocapacity regeneration, the study positions LCF as analytically suitable for resource-policy analysis relative to pollutant-based metrics. Using a heterogeneous-panel econometric framework, we examine long-run associations between natural resource rents, trade openness, renewable energy use, technological progress, and geopolitical risk with LCF performance. Results indicate that GDP exhibits an inverted-U relationship with LCF, trade openness is associated with reduced ecological capacity, and renewable energy shows a consistent positive association. Resource rents correlate with lower LCF, reflecting extractive dependence, while technological progress displays transitional effects linked to uneven absorptive capacity. Geopolitical risk shows mixed but sometimes adaptive associations. These findings collectively demonstrate how rents–openness–energy transitions interact to shape structural sustainability. By offering the first integrated assessment of these factors within an LCF framework for NIEs, the study clarifies its conceptual contribution to resource governance and outlines evidence-based pathways for aligning rent management, trade structures, and clean-energy transitions with long-term ecological stability.