The role of environmental entrepreneurship for sustainable development: Evidence from 35 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa

This research seeks to confirm the achievement of sustainable development in Sub-Sahara Africa. In view of this, a panel of 35 Sub-Saharan Africa countries divided into two sub-panels based on their income groupings, namely low-income, and middle-income countries, from 2000 to 2014 with a cross-sectional dependence among the series was used as a prerequisite for the analysis. We used the Pooled Mean Group estimators of the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model to ascertain the long-run mechanism between variables and analyse the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis. The key results are: (1) income per capita significantly increases environmental pollution where environmental entrepreneurship decreases pollution of the environment across all panels of SSA countries; (2) in the low-income SSA economies, trade openness enhance environmental quality but increase environmental pollution in both the aggregated panel and middle-income SSA nations; (3) with the exception of low-income countries, human development palpably decreases environmental pollution in middle-income countries and in the aggregated panel a reduction is observed; (4) from financial development perspective, it produces positive and significant effect in the aggregated panel of SSA countries and middle-income SSA nations; (5) the environmental Kuznets curve conjuncture is supported for the selected panels in SSA region. Consequently, governments and policymakers should reinforce policies for the reduction of environmental pollution, more importantly, green financing policies, encourage aspiring environmental entrepreneurs to set environmentally-driven businesses, promote the use of environmental products to mitigate environmental problems and achieve sustainable development. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.