Moderating roles of technological innovation and economic complexity in financial development-environmental quality nexus of the BRICS economies

The aspects of globalization are certainly not without economic-related opportunities especially in the developing countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (BRICS). By employing the cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag among other empirical approaches over the period 1995–2017, the following critical results are presented by the investigation. Economic complexity, technological innovation, and financial development all yield desirable outlook toward carbon emission mitigation in the countries while economic growth further shows short- and long-run detrimental effect on environmental quality. Moreover, the combined effect of financial development and economic complexity has no significant effect on carbon emission in the short- and long-run while also neutralizing the direct environmental effect of financial development. Additionally, technological innovation moderate financial development to further mitigate carbon emission, thus justifying the direct and indirect environmental effects of technological innovation. Meanwhile, negative environmental effect of economic growth remained unabated in the entire scenario. This result emphasizes the role of environmental-related technologies transfer in improving the bloc's environmental sustainability.