Democracy, Financial Openness, and Global Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Heterogeneity Across Existing Emission Levels

The determinants of CO2 emissions have attracted many researchers over the past few decades. Most of studies, however, ignore the possibility that effect of independent variables on CO2 emissions could vary throughout the CO2 emission distribution. We address this issue by applying quantile regression methods. We examine whether greater democracy and more financial openness consistently reduce emissions among the most and least emission nations. Our results show that the effect of democracy on CO2 emissions is heterogeneous across quantiles. Among the most emissions nations, greater democracy appears to reduce emissions, but more financial openness does not appear to reduce it

Three Essays on Democracy, Economic Development and the Environment

The effect of democratic development on the state of the environment is a complex question to which some inconclusive and still unsettled answers have been provided in the literature. This thesis formulates three research questions leading to three individual papers with the overall objective of examining the effects of political and economic development on environmental quality. More specifically, this thesis empirically tests the ‘political’ Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis as well as the conventional economic EKC through two cross-country studies, and a case study conducted in Indonesia, an emerging democratic country. The first research question is: Does the relationship between the intensity of emissions/concentration of several air and water pollutants and the level of democracy in a jurisdiction take an EKC inverted-U shape? This study finds strong empirical evidence for political-EKC hypothesis for three pollutants: CO2 and BOD emission and ODS consumptions. The second research question is formulated as: “What are the effects of income and democratic development on water withdrawal?” This study provides new empirical evidence that, rather than increase in income, improved democracy may play a more significant role in reducing water withdrawal. The third research question is: “What is the effect of income on environmental quality and on environmental-economic efficiency in an emerging democratic country?” The results highlight that the provinces in the Western Region of Indonesia are much more efficient in terms of environmental-economic efficiency than the provinces in the Eastern Region. Moreover, there is no strong evidence that income helps improving the environmental quality in Indonesia. Additionally, this study finds that population density may reduce the environmental quality, while human development potentially helps improving the environment

Does Democracy Lead to a Better Environment? Deforestation and the Democratic Transition Peak

Deforestation, Democracy, Economic development, Environmental degradation, Environmental kuznets curve, Political development, Q56, Q23,

Are Democrats Greener than Republicans? The Case of California Air Qua

When it comes to environmental quality preferences, it is popularly believed that Democrats (and more generally, liberals) are green while Republicans (conservatives) are brown. Does empirical evidence support this popular belief? We test the hypothesis that regional political identification leads to differences in concentration outcomes for several measures of California air pollution indicators, including CO, NO2, SO2, O3, PM10, and PM2.5 concentrations. We employ two alternative identification strategies on county-level cluster and year panel data that include proxy variables for political party preferences of the local populace, as well as controlling for the political party affiliations at the state-level legislative and executive branches. In general, we do not find a consistent and statistically significant relationship between pollution outcomes and political variables for California. The popular belief is empirically supported only for NO2 and O3, but not for any of the other pollutants, and even in these two cases the relationship only holds at the local regulatory level and not at the state policymaking level. At the state level, for most of the pollutants no significant effect of party affiliation is identified, and in the rare cases where such an effect exists, it is either too weak to be conclusive or is even counter to popular belief