Analysis shows economic growth negatively influenced by emissions and corruption in SADC, suggesting policy changes needed for sustainability.
The current study sought to establish the nexus among corruption, greenhouse gas emissions, trade, and economic growth. These variables of concern are important for the attainment of sustainable development goals. The study employed the Autoregressive Distributed Lag and Error Correction models to evaluate the nexus among corruption, trade, greenhouse gas emission, and economic growth. In the long run, economic growth was negatively influenced by capital formation, inflation, and greenhouse gas emissions. Whilst corruption is positively related to greenhouse gas emissions and capital formation. The labour force participation rate has a negative effect on corruption in the long term. The short-run dynamics show that gross fixed capital formation negatively impacts corruption. In the third model, it was revealed that, in the long term, both corruption and labour force participation rate reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In the short term, the findings were not statistically significant. The final model demonstrated that corruption, greenhouse emissions, and labour force participation rate negatively affect trade, whereas economic growth, inflation rate, and gross fixed capital formation enhance trade, as signified by their positive coefficients. For developing countries, it’s vital to adopt measures to manage corruption and greenhouse gas emissions, alongside crafting policies that encourage trade and economic growth to achieve sustainability.
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Abel et al. (2025) studied this question.