Environmental policies and energy efficiency: its implications on ecological footprint among OECD countries

Environmental and Ecological Statistics. 2026. Vol. 33. P. 1205–1232.

Аппиа М.

Environmental sustainability remains a central policy challenge in advanced economies, where environmental regulation and technological efficiency interact in complex ways. This study examines the relationship between environmental policy stringency (EPS), energy efficiency (EEI), and ecological footprint across OECD countries over the period of 1990–2023. While prior studies often rely on homogeneous panel estimators, this analysis explicitly accounts for slope heterogeneity using the Mean Group (MG) estimator and complements this with diagnostics and robustness checks for cross-sectional dependence. The results show that improvements in energy efficiency are consistently associated with reductions in ecological footprint across baseline, robustness, and dynamic specifications. In contrast, the effect of environmental policy stringency is sensitive to model specification and country characteristics. Regime-based analysis shows that EPS is insignificant in low-efficiency countries but becomes significant in high-efficiency regimes. Income-based GDP specifications provide partial evidence consistent with an Environmental Kuznets Curve, although the turning point varies across countries. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of cross-country heterogeneity and identify energy efficiency as a key channel for reducing environmental pressure in OECD economies.

Ключевые слова: энергоэффективность, OECD countries, energy efficiency, воздействие на окружающую среду, Ecological footprint, ОЭСР страны, Environmental policy stringency, Heterogeneous panel models, Строгость экологической политики, Модели разнородных панелей

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