Economic and ecological complexity in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from 60 countries

The coronavirus disease 2019 is a deadly disease that globally infected millions of people. It enormously increases economies national healthcare bills and death tolls that deprive the global world. The negative environmental externality further strains the country's healthcare sustainability agenda, causing to decline in global income. The study evaluates the different socio-economic and environmental factors to assess ecological complexity in a large, cross-country data set that includes 60 countries. The study used the following variables for estimation, i.e., coronavirus cases, cost of carbon emissions, per capita economic growth, foreign direct investment inflows, and population growth. Markov Switching Regression, VAR Granger causality and variance decomposition analysis applied on the given dataset. The results show that the COVID-19 cases have a rebound effect on environmental quality. Economic activities started after a lifted lockdown, and unsustainable production and consumption led to a deteriorating natural environment. The U-shaped relationship is found between carbon pollution and per capita income. On the other hand, the inverted U-shaped relationship is found between coronavirus cases and carbon pollution. The foreign direct investment inflows and population density increases carbon pollution. The study concludes that stringent environmental policies and incentive-based regulations help to minimize coronavirus cases and mitigate carbon pollution.