Nuclear Power, Democracy, Development, and Nuclear Warheads: Determinants for Introducing Nuclear Power

Lars Sorge, Anne Neumann, Christian von Hirschhausen and Ben Wealer

No 1811, Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research

Abstract: This paper analyzes the nature of democratic development in a nation on the process of introducing nuclear power over the period 1960 - 2017 for an unbalanced panel of 171 countries. Given the involved political process of introducing nuclear power and its political importance, as well as the current tendency of about 30 countries to “go nuclear”, this question is both of historic and current interest. We apply a multinomial logistic regression approach that relates the likelihood of a country to introduce nuclear power to its level of democratic quality and nuclear warhead possession. The model results suggest that countries with lower levels of democratic development are more likely to introduce nuclear power. Our results moreover indicate that countries which possess at least one nuclear warhead are more likely to continue to use nuclear power instead of not using nuclear power at all. We discuss these results in the context of the public policy debate on nuclear power, yet beyond energy and environmental issues addressing international relations, conflict, and security issues connected to nuclear energy.

Keywords: Nuclear power; nuclear warhead; democracy; multinomial logit; panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C35 P48 Q01 Q34 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 p.
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.669988.de/dp1811.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:diw:diwwpp:dp1811

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers of DIW Berlin from DIW Berlin, German Institute for Economic Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bibliothek ().