Green growth and sustainability: A systematic literature review on theories, measures and future directions

Abstract

Green growth policies are designed to simultaneously tackle climate change and drive economic growth, making them increasingly prominent across various economies. Although qualitative, case-study-based research has provided valuable insights into green growth, there remains a significant gap in quantitative and cross-country analyses. To address this research deficit, it is essential to have a more comprehensive understanding of the green growth literature. Accordingly, our objectives are threefold: (i) to highlight the concepts, definition, and underlying theories of green growth as documented in the literature; (ii) to identify the trends of publications in the green growth literature and highlight the emerging research areas of green growth; and (iii) to state the identified gap in previous studies and other worthwhile empirical investigations for subsequent examination by future studies on green growth. We utilized the 5 databases Scopus, IEEE Explore, Web of Science (WoS), Springer Nature and Google Scholar, VOSviewer, and Biblioshiny R package to examine 13,552 publications published between 1991 and 2024. After deploying a comprehensive screening process, the review considered 167 final studies based on the importance of green growth. The study highlights influential authors and emphasizes the dominant role of green technological innovations, renewable energy consumption, and digitalization on environmental sustainability. Keyword clusters related to green growth include green economic growth and ecological sustainability. Our findings suggest that some measures have been adopted to capture the level of green growth, including a single indicator, data envelopment analysis, and the composite index. Furthermore, enormous investigations have been conducted in some regions of green growth. Other Areas, such as circular economy, waste management, governance, and quality institutions, have not received as much interest. Finally, our research highlights data limitations significantly hindering more robust assessments across countries.