Impact of economic complexity index, globalization, and nuclear energy consumption on ecological footprint: First insights in OECD context

Energy systems around the world must take the opportunity to use low-carbon energy sources and technologies to reduce the global ecological footprint. While nuclear energy has always been very controversial, particularly among environmentalists, some have begun to recommend that nuclear energy be revisited as a source of clean energy to prevent climate change. Therefore, this work aims to estimate the effect of nuclear energy, the economic complexity index, and globalization on the ecological footprints of OECD countries within a multivariate context for the period of 1990–2019. This study examined Cross-Sectional Augmented Autoregressive Distributed Lag, Common Correlated Effects Mean Group, and Augmented Mean Group for model estimations robust to cross-country dependencies and heterogeneity. The empirical results reveal that high scores on the economic complexity index increase the pressure on the ecological footprints of OECD countries. These findings demonstrate the critical importance of nuclear energy production for ecologically sustainable development in OECD nations and act as a useful benchmark for environmental security in other countries throughout the world.