Does Globalization, Tourism, Foreign Direct Investment, and Natural Resources Influencing Ecological Footprint?

The environmental problem has become a worldwide issue that must be frequently examined. Thus, this study investigates the relation of tourism, natural resources, globalization, and foreign direct investment on the ecological footprint of the USA, the UK, Pakistan, China, and India by using annual data from 1995 to 2020. The study applied Zivot and Andrews (1992) test to demonstrate the stationarity properties of the series, and an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach was employed to estimate the long-run and short-run dynamics. The long-run findings disclose that tourism has a significantly positive effect on China and Pakistan, but a significantly negative impact on India. The outcomes further suggest that foreign direct investment increases environmental degradation in India and China in both long and short periods, but contributes to improving the UK’s ecosystem. Besides, globalization in China tends to save its environment. Natural resources in the long run also harm the ecosystems of Pakistan, China, and the USA. The error correction term is negatively significant for all countries. The reliability of the model is investigated through diagnostic tests. The selected model is stable as the critical value of CUSUM and CUSUMSQ lie within the 5% significance level.