Digital-green complementarity: When environmental routines become export capabilities

Buyers and regulators increasingly expect suppliers to demonstrate environmental management, yet the export value of such practices may depend on the complementary capabilities a firm holds and vary across practices. Drawing on resource-based and complementarity theories, this study examines whether digital adoption helps firms convert environmental management routines into export-relevant capabilities. Using survey data on Pakistani manufacturing firms, we estimate recursive mixed-process systems that jointly model digital adoption, green management practices, export propensity, and export intensity. Our results show three patterns. First, green management practices yield no export premium on their own; however, when combined with basic digital technologies, they are positively associated with export performance, consistent with complementarity, with digital adoption strengthening the export payoff of green practices. Second, this complementarity operates on how much firms export (the intensive margin) but is not statistically significant for whether firms export at all (the extensive margin). Third, the moderating effect is not uniform across digital-green combinations. Digital visibility interacts positively and significantly with both green components, whereas transaction-oriented coordination does so only for renewable energy adoption, and the profile does not vary appreciably by firm size. An exploratory analysis pooling nine economies in the Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan (MENAAP) suggests a similar pattern. The study adds to the environmental management and digital-sustainable business model literature by showing that green practices operate as conditional economic capabilities. For practice, the findings suggest that firms and policymakers should combine green-practice adoption with digital tools that support information exchange, documentation, coordination, and standards-oriented communication.