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In recent years, financial development, trade policies, and energy performance have attracted attention due to their behavior on environmental quality. Therefore, the current study examines the impact of financial development, trade openness, primary and renewable energy utilization, and economic growth on the ecological footprint in South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries from 1990 to 2017. This article progresses the proficiency of financial development by utilizing the comprehensive and multidimensional index of financial sector development based on their depth, access, and efficiency of their financial institutions and markets. In order to estimate the robust results, this study employed the cross-sectional dependency tests that allow the second-generation unit root, Westerlund cointegration, augmented mean group (AMG), error correction model (ECM), and Dumitrescu–Hurlin (D-H) panel non-causality tests. The results revealed a very weak effect of financial development in a panel of SAARC countries, while country-specific results reveal that financial development significantly enhances the pollution level in the case of Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. However, it improves the environmental quality in Nepal. Furthermore, trade openness only improves the environmental quality in the case of Nepal. Additionally, the findings explore that primary energy consumption enhances the ecological footprint in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka and reduces in case of Bhutan. On the contrary, renewable energy consumption significantly improves the environmental quality in all countries except Bangladesh. Finally, consistent with these findings, a number of suitable policy implications are expressed in the angle of SAARC economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SCI mago is the Journal and Country Ranking database available freely on the internet. We have accessed the required data from 2008 to 2017 from this database and evaluated the research productivity of SAARC countries and citations in the field of social science subject. This article studied SAARC countries publications, citations, citations per document, selfcitations and degree of self - citations. The study revealed that on an average 6054 articles are published during the study period. India is the only country to publish more than the average citations publications during the ten years of study. India received 78% of citations and stood 1st rank in the study, whereas Pakistan and Bangladesh got 8% and 6% citations and stood 2nd and 3rd rank. Nepal got highest 76% of citations per document and stood 1st rank among the SAARC countries in the last ten years from 2008 to 2017. Further, it is found that the degree of self-citation is 0.24, which is very lowest. Since all the SAARC countries are underdeveloped so it is suggested that the government of SAARC countries has to encourage more and more publications, then only their socio-economic level may increase. Individuals, as well as organisations, should take more interest to publish their research articles in high impact journals both at national and international level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]