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The purpose of this paper is to examine the dynamic linkages amongst ecological footprints, fossil fuel consumption, real income, globalization and population in Egypt in the period from 1971 to 2014.

The paper uses fully modified ordinary least squares (FMOLS) and dynamic ordinary least squares (DOLS) methods to investigate the long run relationships amongst ecological footprints, economic growth, globalization, fossil fuel energy consumption and population. Moreover, the Toda–Yamamoto approach is conducted to examine the causal relationships between variables.

Empirical results of FMOLS and DOLS methods show that real income and fossil fuel consumption are responsible for deteriorating the environment, while globalization and population are found to mitigate it. As for Toda–Yamamoto–Granger causal relationship results, unidirectional causal relation from globalization, population and fossil fuel energy consumption to the ecological footprint exists. Moreover, bidirectional causal relation between real income on the one hand and globalization and the ecological footprint on the other hand is found.

Using carbon dioxide emissions has major weakness as carbon dioxide emissions are considered only part of the total environmental deterioration so this study is the first study for Egypt that uses the ecological footprint as an indicator for environmental quality and environmental pollution and links it with globalization, economic growth, population and fossil fuel energy consumption. Moreover, realizing the direction of causality between these variables might help policymakers in designing the policies to promote the shift towards clean energy sources, especially that achieving sustainable economic growth with more contribution to the global economy depending on diversification of energy sources without deteriorating the environment is considered one of the most important objectives of Egypt’s National Vision 2030.

Achieving the goals of the sustainable development strategy and Egypt’s vision 2030 depends mainly on the existence of sources of funds. And since Egypt faces a great challenge in obtaining finance, then analyzing the drivers of financial development is a vital issue and there is a persistent need to shed light on the key obstacles for it. Thus, this paper aims to empirically assess the impact of natural resources, foreign direct investment (FDI) net inflows, education and clean energy sources on financial development in Egypt using the data of the 1971–2014 period.

The paper uses auto-regressive distributed lag and Toda-Yamomoto approaches to fulfill the purpose.

Empirical results signify that all variables except natural endowments stimulate financial development which can suggest the presence of the natural resources curse in Egypt. Moreover, the feedback effect between financial development and FDI is recognized. Clean energy sources cause financial development and natural endowments. Financial development causes natural endowments and FDI leads to the deployment of more clean energy resources.

Several crucial policy implications are suggested based upon these results as improving the quality and quantity of education and encouraging both domestic and foreign investors by providing several incentives. Moreover, the government has to enhance green finance through financing solar energy projects and other environmentally friendly projects.

It is the first research for Egypt that explores natural resource-financial development nexus using time series analysis according to our information, and two important variables are included in the model which is clean energy sources and FDI. Then, although several studies examined the impact of financial development on clean energy no empirical study before assessed the impact of clean energy on financial development.