National environmental performance: an empirical analysis of policy results and determinants

By D. Esty, Michael E. Porter. Environment and Development Economics, 2005

320 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Efforts to identify the determinants of environmental policy success at the national level have largely been anecdotal and case study based. This article seeks to identify empirically the factors that drive environmental performance as measured by levels of urban particulates and sulfur dioxide and energy use per unit of GDP. Although the data are imperfect and causal linkages cannot be definitively established, the statistical analysis presented suggests that environmental results vary not only with income levels as suggested by the environmental Kuznets Curve literature but also with both the sophistication of a nation's regulatory regime and, perhaps more notably, its broader economic and social context. Thus, at every level of development, countries face policy choices that determine environmental quality in important ways. Strong environmental performance appears to be positively correlated with competitiveness, putting into question the presumed trade-off between economic progress and environmental gains. Although preliminary, these results provide evidence that environmental decision making can be made more data driven and analytically rigorous.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/06adcbf694d2784bc0c7f31981cb0dd8be2bd791

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Citations in the corpus

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN GOOD GOVERNANCE AND CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS: EVIDENCE FROM DEVELOPING ECONOMIES (2012, background): “Regulatory quality can also affect environmental outcomes (Esty and Porters, 2005). Djankov et al. (2002) argued that heavy regulation of entry for firms in markets is associated with less democratic government, greater corruption and larger unofficial economies. Heavy regulation of firm activities ”
Explaining national environmental performance: approaches, evidence, and implications (2011, background): “Democracies also are likely to provide more effective governance, such as a professional civil service, stronger legal system, more accountability, and less corruption (Esty and Porter 2005; Pellegrini and Gerlach 2006) as well as more sustained economic growth (Przeworski et al.”
Decomposition of the environmental Kuznets curve: scale, technique, and composition effects (2010, background): “In addition, Esty and Porter (2005) showed that all the elements of their indices in the regulatory stringency category show a statistically signifi cant relationship with environmental performance, and this implies that more stringent environmental regulations have a possibility to improve the en”
Quality of Government: What You Get (2009, background): “Esty and Porter (2005) also find that institutional factors play a role in explaining environmental performance in terms of urban particulates and energy efficiency, although income levels appear to be the dominant factor in determining environmental outcome.”
The Impacts of Environmental Regulations on Competitiveness (2017, methodology): “(2012) use two composite indexes from the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report and the environmental regulatory regime index from Esty and Porter (2005). These studies do not detect a systematic or robust regulatory gap effect.”
Environmental Regulation, Government R&D Funding and Green Technology Innovation: Evidence from China Provincial Data (2018, background): “In a nutshell, well-designed environmental regulations may lead to a pareto improvement or a “win-win” situation, by not only protecting the environment, but also stimulating innovation through the improvement of products or production processes [8].”
A pathway to circular economy: Developing a conceptual framework for complex value assessment of resources recovered from waste (2017, background): “In addition, the focus on energy and materials flows distracts from the optimisation of processes that foster waste minimisation, and instead operate on the basis of nurturing the connections between industries/businesses for yielding economic advantages and ensuring industry/business stability (Est”