International Trade and Environmental Sustainability Dynamics in SADC

This paper examines how openness of international trade is dynamically related to environmental sustainability in sixteen member states of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) between 2000 and 2024, taking into consideration institutional quality factors, economic development, and structural factors. The study uses the Panel Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS), Pedroni panel cointegration tests, and quantile regression to examine the determination of per capita CO 2 emissions by using trade openness, GDP per capita, government effectiveness, energy use, natural resource rents, and urbanisation. The findings of cointegration prove a long-run equilibrium stability. FMOLS estimates show that trade openness positively but insignificantly increases the typically pooled long-run specifications through urbanisation and natural resource rents and negatively through GDP per capita, which is in line with the phase upper-Environmental Kuznets Curve. The outcome of quantile regression reveals a large distributional heterogeneity with the trade openness decreasing emissions only among high-emitting economies at the seventy-fifth and at the ninetieth percentile which is the imperative effect of the quantile technique demonstrating the need for country-differentiated trade and environmental policy across the SADC.