Is structural innovativeness a panacea for healthier environments? Evidence from developing countries

The United Nations recognizes a healthier environment as a top priority in its sustainable development goals (SDGs). Thus, it is not surprising that a voluminous array of empirical studies has offered empirical narratives on critical stimuli of environmental quality. Surprisingly, the implications of agricultural, manufacturing and mining sectors' innovativeness on environmental quality remained largely unverified. Moreover, the existing studies considered only a variant of the emission indicator (production), neglecting consumption and transferred emissions. Against this backdrop, this study investigates the impacts of aggregate, agricultural, manufacturing and mining sector transformations on the enlisted arrays of pollution indicators in African and Latin American countries over 1990–2018 with robust panel estimators, including a third generation unit-root test that consider structural breaks, pool mean group and augmented mean group models that are vigorous amid cross-sectional exigencies and inter cross-sectional heterogeneities. Accordingly, the following empirical narratives emerged: economic transformation provides varying degrees of environmental enhancing effects mostly in the short run that were not sustained adequately into the long term in both regions. Furthermore, agricultural transformation ensures more lasting positive effects on ecological balance in the two regions than the manufacturing and mining sectors. However, in Africa, the agricultural sector's transformation significantly escalates consumption emissions. The control variables also provide varying effects on various categories of emission indicators, highlighting the appealing attributes of a broad-based investigation. In addition, trade and nonrenewable energy are significant pollutants in both regions, while clean energy consumption enhances environmental qualities more in Latin America than in Africa.