Sustainability has become an important and widely applied concept in the environmental economics literature. Despite the numerous studies employing an environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), this model has been critiqued for its incompleteness. This article builds a modified EKC model to examine the contribution of financial development for achieving sustainable development in the case of 14 selected Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries. Using the Augmented Mean Group (AMG) and Common Correlated Effects Mean Group (CCEMG) estimators, our empirical results show that the EKC hypothesis is valid for per capita CO2 emissions and ecological footprint. The results provide evidence also of the presence of linear and non-linear relationships between financial development and non-sustainability and indicate that financial development is likely to have a small long-term impact on sustainable development. This suggests that current efforts aimed at protecting the environment and achieving sustainability will be ineffective given the extent of the problem.

中文翻译：

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金融发展和宏观经济可持续性：基于修改后的环境库兹涅茨曲线的建模

可持续性已成为环境经济学文献中一个重要且广泛应用的概念。尽管使用环境库兹涅茨曲线 (EKC) 进行了大量研究，但该模型因其不完整而受到批评。本文构建了一个修正的 EKC 模型，以在 14 个选定的中东和北非 (MENA) 国家的案例中检验金融发展对实现可持续发展的贡献。使用增广均值组 (AMG) 和共同相关效应均值组 (CCEMG) 估计器，我们的实证结果表明 EKC 假设对于人均二氧化碳排放量和生态足迹是有效的。结果还提供了金融发展与非可持续性之间存在线性和非线性关系的证据，并表明金融发展可能对可持续发展产生较小的长期影响。这表明，鉴于问题的严重程度，目前旨在保护环境和实现可持续性的努力将是无效的。