Investigating the impact of agricultural value added and agricultural components (rice production, inorganic fertilizers and livestock production) on the ecological footprint in emerging economies in Asia

In the current scenario, exploring ecological threats and their drivers has become a bone of contention among policymakers and central authorities. However, existing literature has not fully analyzed the various key drivers of environmental damage. With this perspective in mind, this study estimate the influence of agricultural value addition, agricultural components (rice production, inorganic fertilizers and livestock production), economic progress, renewable energy and non-renewable energy use on the ecological footprint in Asian emerging economies from 1995 to 2020. This study employed the first-generation Full Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) and Mean Group (MG) methods and the second-generation Augmented Mean Group (AMG) and Commonly Correlated Effects Mean Group (CCEMG) estimators for long term coefficient estimations. The analysis results show that agricultural value added, rice production, inorganic fertilizers, livestock production, economic progress and non-renewable energy use considerably increase the ecological footprint, indicating that these dynamics do not contribute to improving environmental worth. However, the use of renewable energy can help improve the environmental quality of emerging economies in Asia. Furthermore, the results confirm the feedback hypothesis between economic progress and ecological footprint emissions in the Dumitrescu and Hulin casualty test. However, conservation hypotheses exist between the ecological footprint and agricultural value added and between agricultural components (rice production, inorganic fertilizers and livestock production) and the ecological footprint. The study recommends encouraging specific Asian countries to use greener, renewable energy in agriculture, which has the potential to increase agricultural productivity levels and help curb environmental risks by reducing ecological footprints.