Natural resources, socio-technical regimes, and the environmentally sustainable transition: Evidence from OECD countries

The availability of natural resources is critical for an environmentally sustainable transition: greater availability may lead to more exploitation and affect the underlying socio-technical regime, which determines policy strategies and decisions, with significant implications for the environment. By distinguishing countries based on their rate of natural resource depletion, we investigate the differences in supporting socio-technical factors. We use a Panel Vector Auto Regression in first differences on a panel of 36 OECD countries, divided into three sub-panels (‘low’, ‘middle’, and ‘high’) based on their depletion rate, from 1995 to 2021. Some levers, such as economic inequality and the ability to generate rents from resources, exhibit distinct characteristics, suggesting interesting policy implications. Additionally, different structural and technological shifts cause further divergence. The results reveal that in low depletion countries, environmental sustainability is path-dependent, there is no short-sighted interest in maximizing rents from natural resources, and economic inequality (via lobbying) does not hinder the transition. Meanwhile, in these countries, structural and technological changes do not seem to have the same impact on sustainability as they do in high depletion countries.