Can Digital Transformation and FinTech Mitigate the Ecological Resource Curse? Evidence from Eight Resource-Exporting Economies

Natural resource dependence, often proxied empirically by natural resource rents as a share of GDP, can be associated with intensified ecological pressure, but the conditions under which digitalization moderates this relationship remain unclear. Using a balanced annual panel of eight resource-exporting economies covering 1995–2024, this study constructs entropy-weighted digital transformation (DTI) and financial technology (FinTech; FTI) indices and estimates a cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag model with a centered hierarchical three-way interaction. Hansen threshold models and three machine learning algorithms, evaluated through nested leave-one-country-out and blocked time-series validation, provide complementary nonlinear and predictive evidence. At mean DTI and FTI levels, natural resource rents were positively associated with ecological footprint in the long run. The interactions between resource rents and each moderator were negative, and the three-way interaction was also negative (β = −0.218, p < 0.05), indicating complementary buffering. Above DTI = 0.512, the resource rent coefficient became statistically insignificant; above FTI = 0.398, it was insignificant at 5% but remained marginally significant at 10%. XGBoost achieved the best held-out performance (R2 = 0.781 ± 0.064), and its interaction-inclusive importance ranking closely matched the econometric ranking (Spearman ρ = 0.988). These findings suggest that coordinated digital, financial, and institutional development is associated with weaker resource–environment linkages within the studied economies, although the thresholds remain sample-specific and the eight-country design limits generalizability.