Entrepreneurship development, corruption perception, and sustainable development outcomes in emerging economies: the moderating role of digital financial inclusion

Abstract Background Sustainable development remains uneven across emerging economies despite continuing efforts to strengthen entrepreneurship, governance institutions, and financial inclusion. Existing evidence provides limited understanding of whether access-oriented digital financial inclusion conditions the association between entrepreneurship development and sustainability performance across heterogeneous emerging-economy settings. Methods This study examines the relationships among entrepreneurship development, corruption perception, institutional quality, digital financial inclusion, and sustainable development outcomes using a balanced panel of 60 emerging economies over 2009–2024, comprising 960 country-year observations. Sustainable development is measured by the SDG Index Score, while digital financial inclusion is proxied by adult account ownership at a financial institution or mobile-money-service provider. Two-way fixed-effects estimation with Driscoll–Kraay standard errors provides the principal associational estimates. Panel threshold regression and panel quantile regression assess nonlinear and distributional heterogeneity, dynamic system-GMM provides supplementary dynamic evidence, a source-observed sensitivity analysis evaluates dependence on constructed annual observations for entrepreneurship and digital financial inclusion, and time-aware XGBoost–SHAP analysis assesses nonlinear predictive relationships. Results The principal estimates show no statistically significant positive association between entrepreneurship development and sustainable development outcomes, while the Corruption Perceptions Index is also statistically insignificant. Institutional quality, digital financial inclusion, industry value added, and population growth are positively associated with sustainable development outcomes, whereas inflation shows a negative but comparatively weak association. Contrary to the proposed moderation hypothesis, the entrepreneurship–digital financial inclusion interaction is negative and statistically significant in the principal model, while the corresponding interaction is statistically insignificant in the source-observed and dynamic specifications. The threshold analysis identifies a digital financial inclusion threshold of approximately 62.99%, but entrepreneurship is not statistically significant either below or above the threshold, precluding interpretation of the threshold as a beneficial policy benchmark. Quantile estimates further show negative entrepreneurship coefficients across the 25th, 50th, and 75th conditional quantiles, while institutional quality and digital financial inclusion remain positively associated with sustainable development. The source-observed sensitivity analysis preserves the principal conclusions concerning entrepreneurship, corruption perception, and moderation. XGBoost–SHAP additionally identifies population growth as the most influential nonlinear predictor in the temporally held-out sample. Conclusion The findings indicate that sustainable development outcomes in emerging economies are more consistently associated with institutional quality, financial access, and productive structure than with the quantity of newly registered businesses. Digital financial inclusion exhibits a positive direct association with sustainability but does not robustly strengthen the entrepreneurship–sustainability relationship. The results therefore support policy approaches that prioritise institutional effectiveness, meaningful financial access, entrepreneurship quality, productive transformation, and macroeconomic stability rather than numerical business-formation or financial-access targets in isolation.