Beyond Linear Growth: Uncovering Thresholds, Regimes, and Sustainable Development Pathways in RCEP Economies

ABSTRACT Achieving sustained economic performance while advancing clean energy, productive transformation, institutional quality, and regional integration remains a challenge for economically diverse regional blocs. This study investigates how energy conditions, sectoral structure, governance quality, and trade integration influence economic performance across the 15 Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) economies from 2000 to 2023. The empirical framework combines dynamic and endogeneity‐robust panel estimators with nonlinear analysis, endogenous panel threshold estimation, interaction tests, and explainable machine‐learning techniques to capture persistence, heterogeneity, regime dependence, and predictive relationships. The results show that access to clean cooking fuels and technologies and overall energy use are positively associated with economic performance, whereas carbon emissions are negatively associated with it. Industry, manufacturing, and services value added contribute positively, confirming the importance of structural transformation while revealing differences in their relative economic significance. Government effectiveness and political stability also support economic performance, underscoring the role of institutional capacity. Trade effects are asymmetric: exports are positively associated with economic performance, while imports display a negative relationship. Nonlinear and threshold findings indicate that these associations vary across structural and developmental regimes rather than remaining constant throughout the development process. Explainable machine learning identifies energy‐related factors as particularly influential predictors and reveals complementary interactions among energy, governance, production structure, and trade. Overall, economic performance within RCEP emerges from an interconnected, nonlinear, and regime‐dependent development process. The findings call for coordinated policies that expand reliable clean energy access, promote productive upgrading, strengthen governance, reduce emissions, and facilitate higher‐value participation in regional trade networks.