In-and-Beyond State Power: How Political Equality Moderates the Economic Growth-CO₂ Emissions Relationship, 1990-2014

ABSTRACT

This study tests whether greater political equality at the nation-state level moderates economic growth’s association with production-based and consumption-based CO₂ emissions. Based on data for 106 nations from 1990 to 2014, this study finds that greater political equality mitigates both types of emissions, but when interacted with economic growth, it intensifies growth’s association with emissions. Conversely, political equality mitigates emissions when the economy is stagnant or contracts, but has no effect on emissions during times of economic expansion. The results are homogeneous across country income groups. These findings suggest that greater political equality is likely a necessary but insufficient condition to mitigate CO₂ emissions.

KEYWORDS:

• economic growth
• political equality
• CO2 emissions; climate change

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Andrew Jorgenson, Julie Schor, Sarah Babb, and the Boston College Environmental Sociology Working Group for helpful comments and feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Production-based emissions are CO₂ emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels along with gas flaring and cement production within a nation’s borders (World Resources Institute 2018). In contrast, consumption-based emissions ascribe CO₂ emissions to the place of final consumption by adding the emissions embodied in imports and subtracting the emissions embodied in exports from territorial emissions (Quéré et al. 2018).

2. There’s also a large body of literature in economics pertaining to the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC), which makes similar arguments as the modernization approaches discussed in this article. The evidence for the EKC is mixed. The existence of an EKC tends to be country specific and time-variant (Apergis 2016; Awaworyi; Churchill et al. 2018; Liddle and Messinis 2018; also see Sadorsky 2020).

3. The effect of gender and racial inequality on emissions have also been explored (Ergas and York 2012; McGee, Ergas, and Clement 2018).

4. The first difference estimator regresses the change of y on the change of x. The first difference model with one regressor is written as Δy_it = βΔx_it + Δe_it. The first difference estimator is equivalent to the fixed effects estimator with two periods of data.

5. The model suffers from strong cross-sectional dependence according to the Pesaran (2015) test for cross-sectional dependence.

6. The inclusion of a lagged dependent variable with fixed effects can lead to the Nickell bias, but because there is a relatively long time series (T = 25), this is not a substantive problem; The unit root tests for each variable are reported in the supplemental material file. The tests report inconclusive evidence regarding the order of integration for each variable.

7. The Gini does not indicate where along the income distribution that the inequality exists (Jorgenson, Schor, and Huang 2017). However, income share data, which do measure the concentration of income at certain points along the distribution, are scant and not widely available across time for a number of nations.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan P. Thombs

Ryan P. Thombs is a PhD student in the sociology department at Boston College. His research investigates the drivers of global environmental change.