Towards sustainable development: The impact of transport infrastructure expenditure on the ecological footprint in India

The underlying objective of the study is to examine the role of transport infrastructure expenditure incurred by the public sector on ecological footprint while controlling the factors like urbanization, mobile use, electricity consumption, and economic growth in India. In order to implicate the relationship among the variables selected for the period spanning from 1990 to 2018, this study employs the ARDL bounds testing approach to cointegration for inculcating the short-run and long-run relationships of the formulated ecological footprint function. The evolved outcome validated the long-run relationship between the study variables. Further, the result indicates that transport expenditure and economic growth can reduce the ecological footprint, while urbanization, mobile use, and electricity consumption increase it both in the short and long run. In light of these outcomes, policy implications are recommended to expand the transport infrastructure expenditure and sustainable economic growth. Similarly, it urges the need for sustainable urbanization, eco-friendly mobile use, and renewable source-based electricity consumption in India.