How do institutional quality, urbanization, renewable energy, and economic growth impact the ecological footprint in Somalia?

This thesis investigates the multifaceted influences of economic growth, renewable energy, urbanization, and institutional quality on environmental sustainability in Somalia from 1991 to 2018. Employing the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) method, the thesis examines both long-term and short-term dynamics while ensuring the stationarity of variables through the Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF) and Phillips-Perron (PP) tests. The F-bound test confirmed the presence of cointegration demonstrating a long-run relationship among the variables. Both short and long run results reveal that economic growth, urbanization, renewable energy, and institutional quality significantly impact the ecological footprint with globalization proving statistically insignificant. Notably, in the long run, economic growth correlates with an increase in the ecological footprint, while urbanization, renewable energy, and institutional quality contribute to its reduction highlighting the potential for more efficient resource use and governance. However, in the short run, apart from globalization, urbanization was not significant and, hence, had no impact on the ecological footprint. Robustness checks using the Dynamic Ordinary Least Squares (DOLS) method reaffirmed the reliability of the findings, and the model has no issues with any of the diagnostic tests. Finally, this thesis underscores the importance of integrating renewable energy and enhancing institutional quality to achieve sustainable environmental outcomes in Somalia.