Does human capital complement sustainable development goals? Evidence from leading carbon emitter countries

Abstract

In the quest to address economic and environmental issues, the UNDP emphasized generating synergy among various sustainable development goals (SDGs). In this regard, SDG4 (Quality of education) is the most crucial SDG, as human capital may help improve the quality of life and environment in the long run. Against this backdrop, this study explores human capital's direct and moderating effect on carbon emissions in nine leading carbon emitter nations from 1990 to 2018. We rely on a quantile approach to calculate elasticity coefficients and verify results using the cross-sectional-autoregressive-distributed lag (CS-ARDL) procedure. The results suggest that human capital leads to carbon emissions across quantiles when the direct impact of human capital on carbon emissions is assessed. Similarly, human capital helps navigate carbon emissions when interacting with industrial value-added and per-capita income. The association between the squared term of human capital and carbon emissions is negative across quantiles in leading carbon emitter nations. Besides investing in human capital, these nations need to intensify the usage of cleaner energy and advanced technologies because the elasticity coefficients of these variables are found to be negative across quantiles. We propose a sustainable growth roadmap in which interconnectedness among certain SDGs is considered.