Decoupling Economic Growth from Environmental Degradation in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review of Policy Effectiveness

This dataset supports the systematic review article "Decoupling Economic Growth from Environmental Degradation in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review of Policy Effectiveness", which synthesises evidence from twenty-three (23) empirical studies examining how fiscal instruments, institutional reforms, and trade policies affect decoupling outcomes measured as CO₂ emissions, ecological footprint, and load capacity factor in developing and emerging economies. The review covers multiple policy instruments including environmental taxes, carbon pricing, green finance, institutional quality, environmental policy stringency, property rights, trade openness, and economic globalization across geographic regions including BRICS nations, E7 economies, N-11 countries, RCEP member states, and global panels with developing country disaggregation. The dataset includes the PRISMA 2020 checklist, PRISMA flow diagram, inclusion and exclusion criteria (Table 1), complete Boolean search strings for four thematic blocks (Table 2), risk of bias assessment raw data adapted from Joanna Briggs Institute criteria for the twenty-three included studies (Table 3), summary characteristics of the twenty-three included studies including author(s), year, geographic coverage, sample period, analytical method, key variables, and policy instruments examined (Table 4), synthesis of key findings organised by policy instrument themes (Table 5), the data extraction form, and the complete reference list of included studies. All files are available under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0 1.0) license.