Human Capital and Environmental Sustainability

Dohyung Kim and Sun Go
Additional contact information
Dohyung Kim: Department of Economics, Myongji University, Seoul 03674, Korea

Sustainability, 2020, vol. 12, issue 11, 1-14

Abstract: Human capital has been shown as an important determinant of environmental performance at the firm and province levels. We try to identify the impact of human capital on environmental performance at the country level. To address potential endogeneity and measurement errors regarding human capital, we use the primary school enrollment rate a century ago as an instrument for today’s human capital stock. The instrumental variable estimation, based on a sample of 72 countries, shows that human capital has a statistically significant effect on the Environmental Performance Index, a composite measure of national environmental performance, primarily through improving biodiversity, habitat, and sustainable agriculture, all of which are the indicators related to environmental sustainability. These findings from cross-country analysis are broadly consistent with those of firm-level or province-level studies, emphasizing the role of human capital in enhancing the awareness of and compliance with environmental regulations, thus leading to an improvement in environmental performance.

Keywords: environmental sustainability; human capital; environmental performance index; instrumental variable method (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/11/4736/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/11/4736/ (text/html)

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:gam:jsusta:v:12:y:2020:i:11:p:4736-:d:369527

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().