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Spending for the Environment: General Government Expenditure Trends in Europe

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Abstract

Are European Union countries converging towards a similar model of public spending for environmental protection? National spending policies for environmental protection might be the result of country specific circumstances and priorities, but also of a shared vision towards the achievement of environmental goals as member of the European Union, in compliance with European Directives. This paper aims to empirically investigate models of environmental expenditures at European level, looking at the composition of public expenditure for environmental protection. It also contributes to the debate on the efficacy of public spending in the environmental domain. Results reject the existence of a homogeneous model of expenditure for environmental protection at European level. Furthermore, higher level of environmental performance seem to be positively correlated with the public expenditures in the environmental domain and partially with the different composition of the expenditure.

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Notes

  1. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Government_expenditure_on_environmental_protection.

  2. Environmental protection expenditure includes “all activities directly aimed at the prevention, reduction and elimination of pollution or any other degradation of the environment” (Eurostat 2016, available at: http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/metadata/en/env_ac_exp1r2_esms.htm).

  3. The detailed structure and explanatory notes for the General Expenditure classified according to COFOG categories are described by the Statistics Division of the United Nations at the following link: http://unstats.un.org/unsd/cr/registry/regcst.asp?Cl=4.

  4. Czech Republic presents some negative values for NEC category due to the sale of carbon trading rights in 2009. More detail on Eurostat metadata at http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/cache/metadata/en/gov_a_exp_esms.htm.

  5. The Environmental Performance Index is a project lead by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy and Yale Data-Driven Environmental Solutions Group at Yale University, in collaboration with the Samuel Family Foundation, McCall MacBain Foundation, and the World Economic Forum.

  6. These variables have different sources. EPI is extracted by http://epi.yale.edu/; GDP and EXP are extracted from Eurostat database http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/data/database.

  7. GHG is extracetd from OECD.stat https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AIR_GHG.

  8. The reference cluster is represented by the cluster 3 which includes Netherlands only.

  9. The source of the covariates is Eurostat.

  10. OECD database does not report GHG index for Malta and Cyprus.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Law, Economics, Management and Quantitative Method, University of Sannio, Via delle Puglie, 82 - 82100, Benevento, Italy

    Salvatore Ercolano

  2. Naples, Italy

    Oriana Romano

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  1. Salvatore Ercolano
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  2. Oriana Romano
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Correspondence to Salvatore Ercolano.

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Ercolano, S., Romano, O. Spending for the Environment: General Government Expenditure Trends in Europe. Soc Indic Res 138, 1145–1169 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-017-1695-0

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