Unravelling the causal dynamics of export performance, globalization intensity, and energy consumption on environmental degradation: Insights from ARDL and ARIMA forecasting models

Global trends are increasingly leaning towards digitalisation, while the rising demand for energy and interconnected markets is expanding the ecological footprint worldwide. Bangladesh, a key exporter of ready-made garments (RMGs), consumes energy and resources at over twice the rate of natural replenishment. The study investigates how the Export Value Index, Globalization Index, and coal consumption influence Bangladesh's ecological deficit. It employs an Auto-Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model to analyse Bangladesh's annual data from 1990 to 2021. The ARDL bound test confirms a long-term relationship among the variables. The results indicate that a 1% increase in export performance and coal consumption results in a 0.42% and 0.59% growth in the ecological deficit in the long term, and 0.23% and 0.058% in the short term, respectively. Additionally, a 1% increase in globalization raises the ecological deficit by 0.009% in the long run but decreases it by 0.0124% in the short term. This study uses advanced cointegration techniques to strengthen the resilience of the findings. It also employs the advanced forecasting method Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average (ARIMA) to project the ecological deficit. The study proposes policy recommendations for a sustainable environment and stricter environmental regulatory frameworks.