Urbanization, Household Savings, and Environmental Sustainability: Investigating the cointegrating relation in Indian Context

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-685-2_22How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Environmental Sustainability; ARDL Co-integration; Structural Breaks; Dynamic OLS; Error Correction; Wald Statistics

Abstract

The study makes an attempt to understand the dynamic relation between urbanization, household savings, and environment in Indian context using popular co-integration model, ARDL. The study collects data for fifty years [1975-2024] on three variables viz. ecological footprint per capita, urban population as a % of total population and gross domestic savings which is then log transformed for subsequent analysis. Furthermore, the study incorporated single structural break in the ARDL model thus making the same as quasi linear. To strengthen the results, the study carried out additional test for long run; Dynamic OLS [DOLS]. The study results showed both Urbanization and Domestic Savings were impacting EFP significantly, besides all the three variables were found to be co-integrated with variables showing fast correction while moving towards long run equilibrium. The dummy incorporated for detecting structural breaks identified 2002 as the year of break. Further, all the model pre-requisites including serial correlation, variable redundancy and model stability were examined, and these were found to be within limits. The results of the study have a number of implications, first the proving of a long-term relation suggests that the process of urbanization and the patterns of household savings for India are not isolated hence requires a joint action, second the policy makers aiming to target environmental issues may instead focus on other variables included as a part of co-integration chain i.e. urbanization and domestic savings. For urbanization, smoother finance for housing with concentration on green buildings must be the key drivers while for domestic savings, the same must be redirected towards measures focused towards urban development.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Kartikay Ahluwalia
AU  - Rakesh Shahani
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/26
TI  - Urbanization, Household Savings, and Environmental Sustainability: Investigating the cointegrating relation in Indian Context
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Infrastructure Development and Sustainability (ICIDS 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 400
EP  - 414
SN  - 3005-155X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-685-2_22
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-685-2_22
ID  - Ahluwalia2026
ER  -