Blue-green ecological infrastructure endowment and urban wastewater management efficiency in BRICS countries

Résumé

This study examines the economic and environmental associations of ecological infrastructure endowment, operationalised as a blue-green infrastructure (BGI) composite index, with water productivity, sanitation access, water stress, and air quality across the five BRICS economies from 2000 to 2023. Stochastic Frontier analysis (SFA), data envelopment analysis (DEA), the Malmquist productivity index, panel quantile regression, and Bayesian network analysis are applied to a balanced panel of 120 annual observations. Panel cointegration diagnostics confirm that level-based estimation captures genuine long-run associations rather than spurious relationships. The BGI index is constructed from three ecological infrastructure proxies: forest coverage, biodiversity status, and hydrological endowment, via PCA, retaining 92.1% of total variance. Results indicate that a one-standard-deviation increase in BGI is associated with a log water productivity coefficient of 0.825, corresponding to approximately a 128% increase in water productivity levels at the sample mean, while the water stress association is −23.546 percentage points per standard-deviation increase in BGI, the strongest and most consistent finding. BGI is insignificantly linked to sanitation coverage, likely due to its high capital requirements. Sanitation coverage has a moderate direct relationship with particulate air concentration. BRICS economies average 67.4% of potential water productivity and generate an average Malmquist index of 3.2% annual total factor productivity. Quantile regression indicates negative direct relationships between BGI and water productivity at lower performance quantiles, moderated by urbanisation. Bayesian network centrality identifies BGI as the most connected node (total degree 13), operating primarily through water stress dependencies. Findings indicate that BGI is conditionally effective for water stress reduction and yields positive water productivity associations primarily in urbanised and institutionally capable settings.

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