The Economics of Green Constitutions

Imhof Sina, Jerg Gutmann and Stefan Voigt
Additional contact information
Imhof Sina: University of Hamburg, Institute of Law and Economics, Hamburg, Germany

Asian Journal of Law and Economics, 2016, vol. 7, issue 3, 305-322

Abstract: Over the last decades, more and more countries have integrated environmental protection into their constitution. In this article, we argue that a simple economic model can explain why some countries have adopted the legal innovation of constitutional environmental protection, while others have not. Environmental protection can be thought of as an investment that only pays off over the long term, and may even imply intergenerational redistribution to the advantage of future generations. Moreover, the adoption of constitutional environmental protection leads to the provision of public goods, which redistributes resources among all members of a society. Taken together, these arguments imply that democratic states with a culture that favors future-oriented behavior are more likely to entrench environmental protection in their constitution. We study the adoption of constitutional environmental protection in a panel dataset for 122 countries using semi-parametric survival analysis techniques. Our results suggest that future-oriented preferences are a robust determinant of a country’s propensity to adopt a green constitution. Political institutions are less important and do not exert a statistically significant effect.

Keywords: democracy; endogenous constitutional rights; environmental protection; future orientation; long-term orientation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 D23 H41 K11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1515/ajle-2016-0025 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:ajlecn:v:7:y:2016:i:3:p:305-322:n:4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyter.com/journal/key/ajle/html

DOI: 10.1515/ajle-2016-0025

Access Statistics for this article

Asian Journal of Law and Economics is currently edited by Noriyuki Yanagawa

More articles in Asian Journal of Law and Economics from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().