Green growth and technological innovation for environmental quality: Empirical insights from the BRICS countries

The BRICS economies account for a substantial share of global output and emissions, continue to depend heavily on fossil fuels, and have received limited joint empirical attention on how green growth and green technological innovation interact to shape environmental quality. This study examines the effects of green growth and green technological innovation, alongside gross domestic product (GDP), GDP squared, foreign direct investment (FDI), fossil fuel consumption and population growth, on environmental quality, proxied by CO2 emissions per capita, across the BRICS economies. Annual panel data spanning 1990 to 2023 are drawn from the World Development Indicators, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the World Intellectual Property Organization, and analyzed using the pooled mean group autoregressive distributed lag (PMG-ARDL) estimator, with panel DOLS and FMOLS robustness checks and Dumitrescu-Hurlin panel causality tests. Green growth and green technological innovation significantly reduce CO2 emissions, GDP and GDP squared jointly confirm the Environmental Kuznets Curve, and FDI supports a pollution halo effect, while fossil fuel consumption and population growth intensify emissions. Green growth and green technological innovation exert a unidirectional causal influence on environmental quality, unlike the bidirectional relationships found for GDP, FDI, fossil fuels and population. BRICS governments should treat green growth and technological innovation as complementary policy levers, and the study offers country differentiated policy recommendations, together with a discussion of measurement and identification limitations that qualify the generalizability of the results.