ABSTRACT To achieve sustainability and ecological targets, economies worldwide are now paying attention to the role of green production practices (GPP). Against this backdrop, this study aims to analyze the nexus between green practices and various important factors associated with economic growth (ECG). In this regard, the role of digitization, natural resources, and renewable energy is examined for the United States of America (USA) from 1991 to 2021. For robust and sophisticated analysis, we employed the Quantile‐on‐Quantile Kernel Regularized Least Squares (QQKRLS) method to assess the relationships at different quantiles while the Quantile‐on‐Quantile regression method is employed as a robustness check. In addition, Quantile‐on‐Quantile Granger causality (QQGC) is used to check the predictive power of the independent variable over the dependent variables across all quantiles. The key results include: energy security risk (ESR) has a robust positive association with ECG across all quantiles; GPP only shows a significant positive relationship at higher quantiles of both variables; total natural resources (TNR) has an inverse relationship in the upper quantiles with economic growth; low levels of renewable energy consumption (REC) positively impact ECG across all quantiles; and digitalization (DIG) exhibits a weak positive relationship with ECG at medium quantile levels. Furthermore, the QQGC results show that all the independent variables can significantly predict ECG. On the basis of the empirical exercise, some policy recommendations are offered for optimizing energy, natural resource, and digital strategies to achieve sustainable ECG targets for the country.
Jahanger et al. (2025) studied this question.