Social Unrest and Environmental Performance

Mahdi Fawaz () and Donatella Gatti
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Mahdi Fawaz: CEPN Ð USPN

No 2025.07, Working Papers from FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists

Abstract: There is a growing consensus that policies such as carbon taxes are needed to improve environmental performance. We propose a theoretical framework and a model to examine how environmental concerns determine political support for carbon taxation and the incentives for the poor to revolt, replace the incumbent government, and achieve a fairer distribution of income. Our main result is that the incentive to revolt is an inverted U-shaped function of environmental performance. On the empirical side, we construct a normalized Social Unrest Index (SUI) based on riots and battles data from the ACLED database. Then, we analyze the determinants of SUI in a panel of 211 countries between 1997 and 2022 including a quadratic term of the EPI index (Yale University). We find an inverted U-shaped relationship that is robust in all the specifications tested. In autocratic regimes, as EPI rises from 30% to 40%, SUI predicted average almost doubles from 12.8% to 20.4%, while it falls at higher EPI levels. Our results have important policy implications.

Keywords: Social Unrest; Environmental Performance; Carbon Tax; Redistribution; Democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H23 O13 P18 P43 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 47 pages
Date: 2025-11
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http://faere.fr/pub/WorkingPapers/Fawaz_Gatti_FAERE_WP2025.07.pdf First version, 2023 (application/pdf)

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Working Paper: Social Unrest and Environmental Performance (2025)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fae:wpaper:2025.07

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