Individualism and climate change policies: International evidence

Trung Vu

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: This paper examines the extent to which the cultural dimension of individualism-collectivism matters for the stringency of climate change policies across the world. I postulate that individualistic societies are endowed with a better capacity to implement stringent climate change regulations compared with their collectivistic counterparts. This notion is tested using data for a world sample of up to 92 countries. To achieve causal inference, I isolate exogenous sources of variation in individualistic cultures, based on blood distance to the UK and historical pathogen prevalence. The results lend strong empirical support to my propositions. I also find evidence that individualism exerts a positive influence on the stringency of climate change policies through enhancing the quality of governance and female political presentation. To account for unobserved country-specific factors, I perform subnational analyses using data from the World Values Survey. The results indicate that survey participants with an orientation towards individualistic cultures tend to self-report positive attitudes to pro-environmental policies, which is consistent with the international evidence.

Keywords: climate change; environment; individualism; collectivism; culture. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O44 Q54 Q58 Z10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020-03-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/98888/1/MPRA_paper_98888.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:98888

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().