Women’s Political Empowerment, Government Effectiveness, and Ecological Footprint: Evidence from BRICS Countries

Abstract

Environmental pressure and institutional inclusion are important policy concerns in the five original BRICS economies. This study examines the association between women's parliamentary representation and ecological footprint per capita in Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa during 2000–2021, and considers government effectiveness as a potential moderator. The descriptive dataset contains 110 country-year observations. Panel autoregressive distributed lag estimates obtained using a pooled mean group approach indicate a negative long-run association between women's representation and ecological footprint (coefficient = −0.1019, as reported); the short-run coefficient is not statistically distinguishable from zero. The reported governance-interaction coefficient is negative (−0.0382), suggesting that the conditional association becomes more negative at higher levels of government effectiveness. In the baseline specification, the renewable-energy and foreign-investment coefficients are not statistically significant; green innovation changes sign across specifications. Leave-one-country-out estimates retain a negative coefficient for women's parliamentary representation, and a separate emissions specification has a similar direction. Because the analysis involves five countries, observational measures, model-dependent estimates and unresolved sources of endogeneity, the results should be interpreted as associations rather than causal effects. The findings motivate further examination of institutional context in gender representation–environment relationships.