The Economics of Material Resource Efficiency and Climate Resilience: Cross-Country Panel Evidence with Implications for Saudi Arabia

This study examines the association between material-use efficiency and national climate resilience in a comparative panel of 14 advanced and emerging economies over 2016–2022, including Saudi Arabia. Climate resilience is proxied by the ND-GAIN Country Index. Material-use efficiency is measured using domestic material consumption per unit of GDP (DMC/GDP), reverse min–max normalized so that higher values indicate lower material intensity. This indicator captures only the material-efficiency dimension and is not a comprehensive circular-economy measure. The analysis also considers renewable-electricity generation share, high-technology exports, GDP per capita, urbanization, and research and development expenditure. Japan is excluded because the supplied DMC/GDP series is zero-coded throughout the study period, while the uploaded OECD climate-policy extract does not cover the study countries and is therefore excluded from the baseline model. The two-way fixed-effects model uses 83 complete observations across 13 countries after listwise deletion for missing R&D data. The estimated association between material-use efficiency and ND-GAIN is positive but statistically insignificant (β = 0.809, wild-cluster-bootstrap p = 0.883). The findings therefore do not establish that lower material intensity is associated with higher climate resilience in this sample. Results are interpreted as conditional associations rather than causal effects, and Saudi Arabia is treated as one country within the comparative panel. This study contributes a transparent, narrowly defined cross-country assessment while highlighting the limits of aggregate material-intensity indicators and short-panel inference.