Sustainable green growth in developing economies: An empirical analysis on the belt and road countries

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) initiated by the Chinese government could be regarded as a systematic framework for promoting economic cooperation and development among the countries along the Belt and Road and China. This paper attempts to analyze economic and environmental performance in 61 developing countries along Belt and Road. An additive total factor productivity growth measure allows aggregating contributions of individual countries along the BRI to construct a reasonable measure. Both desirable and undesirable outputs are considered. The growth in the total factor productivity is decomposed with respect to the economic and environmental contributions. The annual average growth rate of green productivity is 3.1%, and the disparity of economic and environmental performance could be observed among countries. Some countries show robust economic growth while environmental performance slows down green growth. This indicates that developing economies should pay attention to environmental impacts and promote sustainable development by sharing emission-reduction technologies.