The impact of natural resources, human capital, and foreign direct investment on the ecological footprint in Iran

The ecological footprint is a resource accounting tool that helps countries to assess their environmental resources. In recent years, human demand for nature has exceeded the capacity of the planet, and most countries are facing ecological deficit problems. Due to the importance of the issue, in this article, the impact of natural resources, foreign direct investment, and human capital on the ecological footprint of Iran from the years 1980 to 2019 was investigated using the autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) model and the Granger causality test. The results indicate that natural resources and foreign direct investment, in the short term (with a lag) and long term, have a positive and significant impact on the ecological footprint while human capital has no significant effect on the ecological footprint. The error correction model in this study was set at -0.94, indicating if it moves from one period to another, 0.94% of the dependent variable’s deviation (ecological footprint) is corrected from the long-term path of the independent variables. Granger causality results also indicate that ecological footprint has a two-way causality relationship with natural resources while showing neither a causal relationship with foreign direct investment nor with human capital.