Revisiting Economic Growth through Sustainability Lenses

The goal of economic growth has also remained a core policy agenda, but it is witnessing growing challenges due to demographic changes, ecological decline, and pressure due to the globalization process. This study focuses on the combined impact of sustainable population, ecological capital, trade flow, financial integration, and industrial innovation on economic growth in a cleaner production context, using annual data on China and Russia from 1990 to 2024. To consider cross-sectional dependence, heterogeneity, and mixed orders of integration, cross-sectionally augmented autoregressive distributed lag (CS-ARDL) methodology is applied, and to check robustness, the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) estimator is applied. The results suggest that sustainable population, financial integration, and industrial innovation have positive and statistically significant effects on economic growth. In addition, the long-run estimates indicate that a 1 % change in sustainable population, ecological capital, and trade flow accelerates economic growth by 0.342%, 0.362%, and 0.0116%, respectively. Policy-wise, the findings suggest that population policies must be based on the sustainability of the population and the quality of human capital, as opposed to the size of the population. It is appropriate that ecological capital is treated as a productive resource by environmental policy, since long-term economic resiliency can be created through moderation in short-run growth. Second, the policy of trade and monetary integration should be integrated with cleaner production to foster the diffusion of technology and facilitate green investment channels.