Abstract
This paper investigates how financial development, economic growth, environmental policies, technology, and trade openness, affect the ecological footprint in developed economies. Specifically, the study focuses on the period from 2000 to 2022. The application of a robust panel cointegration approach, cross-section, and slope homogeneity tests to validate the presence of slope heterogeneity among countries in addition to unit root tests to confirm the stationarity of all variables, enabling the use of the AMG method for analyzing long-run coefficients. The empirical findings reveal a consistent and long-term relationship among the variables indicating a negative link between finance, growth, environmental policy, and trade openness, and eco-footprint. The results interestingly portray the existence of an inverted U-shaped curve between financial development, economic growth, and eco-footprint. The Dumitrescu and Hurlin (DH) causality analysis reveals a non-causal connection between financial development, economic growth, trade openness, and ecological footprint as well as a unidirectional causal link between ecological footprint to environmental technology, while a bidirectional causal relationship is observed between ecological footprint and environmental policy.