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Corruption and Climate Change Policies: Do the Bad Old Days Matter?

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Abstract

We study the effect of countries’ historical legacy with corruption on recent climate change policies and on global cooperation. Current policy outcomes build on policy choices made in previous years, and these choices were likely affected by the degree of corruption at the time. Our empirical findings using data for up to 131 countries suggest that accumulated historical experience with corruption is important for today’s policy outcomes, and appears to be more important than the current level of corruption.

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Notes

  1. See Holmberg et al. (2009) for a survey of the effects of governance and corruption on environmental sustainability.

  2. Results for this alternative operationalization of KP Commitment are available upon request.

  3. In additional estimations (available upon request), we find that this difference in results is not due to the larger sample size using the WB measures. If we artificially restrict Models 3–4 to the samples used in Models 1–2, the Corruption-control measures based on the World Bank source continue to be statistically significant.

    Table 2 Main regressions
    Full size table

  4. The main contribution of this paper is to propose a measure of corruption which takes historical experience into account (using existing corruption measures) in the determination of climate change policies. We leave it for future research to study the possible advantages of alternative corruption measures for this line of research.

  5. One may be concerned that because Corruption-control capital is set to zero for all countries in the first year of each sample, we could under-estimate the effect of Corruption-control capital considering that the actual experience with corruption started at an earlier point in time. In an additional robustness test we explore whether this initial under-estimation threatens our inferences. We set the initial value of Corruption-control capital to the first available value of the Corruption-control level rather than to zero. Our results are fully robust.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, 40292, USA

    Per G. Fredriksson

  2. Department of Geography and Environment, Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London, WC2A 2AE, UK

    Eric Neumayer

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  1. Per G. Fredriksson
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  2. Eric Neumayer
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Correspondence to Per G. Fredriksson.

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Fredriksson, P.G., Neumayer, E. Corruption and Climate Change Policies: Do the Bad Old Days Matter?. Environ Resource Econ 63, 451–469 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10640-014-9869-6

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