Impact of economic growth, natural resources and trade on ecological footprint: do education and longevity promote sustainable development in Algeria?

ABSTRACT The world needs to move quickly towards sustainability that should characterize all production and consumption patterns. The global economic growth which was built on natural resources and biodiversity over centuries has resulted in two main issues: environmental degradation and climate change. This created a big challenge in the recent decades related to balancing economic growth with environmental quality preservation, which has been a hot topic capturing the interest of researchers from different disciplines. One of the possible ways to reduce environmental degradation while enhancing economic growth is investing in human capital. This study investigates the determinants of ecological footprint as a proxy for environmental quality in Algeria from 1980 to 2017 using several economic indicators. Another objective of the present study is to assess how education and life expectancy as social indicators can influence the environmental quality. The autoregressive distributed lags (ARDL) approach is used to estimate the constructed environmental degradation models. As expected, the obtained findings show that import is a significant factor that reduces ecological footprint in the long- and the short-run contrary to economic growth, energy use, export and natural resources rent. Moreover, the findings show that education and life expectancy increase environmental degradation in the short-run. However, while life expectancy keeps increasing environmental degradation in the long-run, education reduces it. In light of these findings, the current study provides several recommendations for better management of the country’s natural and human resources, which could help policymakers in directing the country towards sustainable development.