Linking Gender-Inclusive Leadership, Finance, and Trade Openness to Environmental Sustainability: Insights for an SDG-Oriented Policy Agenda

This study investigates how gender-inclusive leadership and trade integration shape environmental sustainability in China, addressing a key gap in the literature where most prior work has focused on aggregate governance, finance, or growth without considering how gender representation in leadership and trade openness jointly relate to environmental outcomes. China provides a particularly relevant setting because it is both a leading global emitter and one of the world’s most trade-integrated and rapidly growing economies, so changes in leadership structures, financial deepening, and external openness can have sizable environmental consequences. Given the nonlinear and non-normal nature of the variables, the analysis relies on nonlinear econometric tools, specifically quantile-on-quantile ARDL and Quantile Granger Causality, applied to quarterly data from 1998Q1 to 2024Q4. The results show that the impact of gender-inclusive leadership on environmental sustainability is state-dependent, with improvements at lower environmental pressure but a predominantly negative long-run association at mid to upper quantiles, while financial development tends to support sustainability, and economic growth and trade openness are generally linked to lower sustainability across much of the quantile range. By narrowing the research gap on gender-inclusive leadership and explicitly motivating China as a critical case, this study offers context-specific evidence that can guide policies aimed at fostering inclusive leadership and greener finance while carefully managing the environmental consequences of rapid growth and deeper trade integration.