Environmental sustainability driven by ICT capital, financial efficiency, and tourism toward achieving green growth

Abstract

AbstractDespite the significant increase in Information and communication technology (ICT) diffusion, tourism development, and financial development in China, their plausible combined effect on green growth (GG) has not been investigated, leaving a gap in the current literature. This study contributes to the literature by examining the impact of ICT diffusion, tourism activity, and financial development on GG in China over the period 1996–2020. The Autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) and Quantile ARDL (QARDL) techniques applied to provide empirical evidence, which infers that ICT diffusion urges GG in China in the long‐and‐short‐run. Financial development, which is measured through financial market efficiency and financial institution efficiency, tends to improve GG in China in the long run. The estimated results report a positive nexus between tourism activity and GG at the highest quantiles in the long run. In the end, important policy suggestions are provided for accelerating sustainable GG in China.