Abstract
Economic diversification remains a central policy challenge for small, sectorally concentrated jurisdictions. This paper examines whether jurisdiction-level ESG conditions and fiscal-revenue outcomes are individually and jointly associated with growth in Macau’s non-gaming economy over the period of 2009–2025. A jurisdictional ESG composite index is constructed from three publicly verifiable sub-indicators: energy intensity, workplace injury incidence and professional-services density. A Complementary Tax Revenue Shortfall (CTRS) is derived from the gap between projected and collected Complementary Tax revenues and is interpreted as a forecast–outturn gap rather than a direct measure of fiscal incentives. Using OLS estimation with HC3 and Newey–West standard errors and wild-cluster-bootstrap inference, and controlling for visitor arrivals, labour-force growth, Hong Kong GDP growth and a COVID-19 dummy, this study finds that a wider revenue shortfall is positively associated with non-gaming growth, while the ESG index enters positively but only at the ten-percent level. The interaction term is negative and statistically insignificant. Because the sample is short (T = 17; 16 usable growth observations) and the constructs are proxies, the findings should be read as preliminary and associational rather than causal. They nonetheless offer a transparent, replicable template for assessing fiscal and ESG channels of diversification in a gaming-dependent microeconomy.