Economic growth, social inclusion, and environmental protection: assessing the existence of green growth in Pakistan

The Fifth Ministerial Conference on Environment and Development in Asia and the Pacific (MCED-5) provided a regional implementation plan to pursue economic development in Asia-Pacific. Achieving environmentally sustainable economic growth or green growth is considered necessary by the ministerial declaration of the conference. The ministerial declaration defines green growth as an approach to sustaining economic growth and employment creation, a prerequisite for effective poverty reduction while coping with natural resource constraints and climate change. Based on the importance of green growth, the study seeks to investigate the progress towards sustainable economic development in Pakistan from 1990 to 2019. The study employs structural equation modeling (SEM) to determine the direct and indirect effects of the variables of the green growth model adopted in the MCED-5. The results of the study indicate that an increase in the net national income of the country leads to increased natural resource depletion. The declining stock of natural capital points towards the difficulty in fulfilling biocapacity sustainability in Pakistan while achieving social progress and declining carbon intensity in the quest for sustainable development. Based on the analysis, it can be claimed that the negative impact of increasing inclusive wealth on natural capital makes Pakistan in environmental terms a weakly sustainable nation. Thus, the conclusion is that Pakistan is following a path of weak sustainability. As a result, there is a need to shift the country’s sustainable economic development from weak sustainability to strong sustainability if the increasing natural resource depletion is to be restrained.