Unleashing the influence of national knowledge capabilities and institutions for long-run green resilience across selected ASEAN economies

Green economic resilience has become a central development concern for ASEAN economies as they seek to sustain economic progress while responding to environmental pressures, energy-transition challenges, and uneven institutional capacity. This study examines how national knowledge capabilities and institutional quality jointly shape green economic resilience in seven ASEAN economies over the period 2000–2024. Rather than imposing a common regional coefficient structure, the analysis employs country-specific autoregressive distributed lag error-correction models to capture heterogeneous long-run adjustment processes and nationally differentiated sustainability pathways. The results provide no support for a uniform ASEAN-wide knowledge–institution–resilience mechanism. Evidence of a validated long-run relationship is strongest for Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, whereas Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore do not satisfy the joint long-run validation criteria in the baseline specifications. The conditional estimates further indicate that institutional quality does not consistently strengthen the contribution of national knowledge capabilities across countries. Thailand provides the clearest and most robust evidence of institutional complementarity, with the marginal association between national knowledge capabilities and green economic resilience becoming more favorable at higher levels of institutional quality. The Philippines exhibits a similar but less precisely estimated pattern, while the remaining country results are negative, statistically weak, or sensitive to model specification and structural-break treatment. These findings suggest that national knowledge capabilities should be considered as conditional development assets whose sustainability value depends on institutional alignment and complementary structural conditions. The study contributes to sustainability literature by demonstrating that green economic resilience emerges from country-specific interactions among knowledge capabilities, institutional quality, renewable-energy transition, financial development, and productive transformation.