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Abstract The United Nation’s sustainable development goals (UN-SDGs) like accessibility to renewable energies (SDG-7), sustainable production and consumption (SDG-12), as well as stable economic growth all centre on the notion of human development (HDI) and reflected in (SDG-8). In line with this motivation, this study explores the environmental sustainability targets for a panel of South Asian economies that are disproportionately affected by a huge energy deficit i.e., energy poverty, and technological immobility. This study considers evidence from south Asian nations to provide the role of certain indicators of human development in the wake of economic development and environmental quality objectives by unraveling the complex relationships between per capita income, access to technological innovation, access to clean energy, and urbanization. Employing a balanced panel econometric model, this study investigate the hypothesized nexus between specific macro-economic variables among South Asian economies. The empirical evidence indicates that the human development index (HDI), per capita income, accessibility to clean energy, technological innovation, as well as urbanization all exhibits a long-run equilibrium relationship over the study period. However, income per capita, accessibility to clean energy and technological innovation all exert a positive impact on HDI for the selected countries, while urbanization shows a negative impact on HDI. Furthermore, causality relationship shows a feedback causality relationship between income per capita, access to clean energy and urbanization with the human development variable, while access to technological innovation has a one-way causality with the HDI. This current study importantly extends the extant knowledge, by presenting new insights into the interaction between human development and its antecedents from a whole new contextual perspective. These outcomes will assist policymakers and stakeholders to obtain new insights into the crucial role of clean energy accessibility, technological innovation, income per capita, and urbanization on HDI processes among South Asian countries.
Gyamfi et al. (Sun,) studied this question.