Assessing the impact of the sharing economy and technological innovation on sustainable development: An empirical investigation of the United Kingdom

This study adds to the existing literature on the sharing economy by critically evaluating its macro-level impacts and those of technological innovation on sustainability in the United Kingdom, where more than 60% of the population participates in the sharing economy activities. We apply the autoregressive distributed lags model and fully modified ordinary least squares approach to examine 37 years of historical data and elicit robust findings. Our main results are threefold. First, while an initial rise in the sharing economy does not lead to short-run changes in sustainable development, its impact becomes positive in the long run and advances sustainable development. Second, sustainable development is a long-term process to which technological innovation positively contributes, irrespective of the short or long run. Third, domestic and foreign investors positively contribute to sustainability, while economic growth has an inverted U-shape relation with sustainable development. These findings thus suggest that the sharing economy and innovation help boost real-world development and promote a circular economy.