CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Tse, Tat Hong |
|---|---|
| Title | A Quantitative Study of the Relations Between Democracy and Carbon Dioxide Emissions: Do democracies lead to stronger pro-climate policies in terms of cutting carbon dioxide emissions? |
| Summary | In view of the intensifying global policy debate on climate change action, the issue of the environment and democracy has attracted a rising, albeit form a low base, number of studies, including this paper in recent years. As the theoretical analysis of democracy points to both directions regarding its relationship with carbon emissions, this paper endeavours to shed light the issue with an empirical approach, covering a 20 year-period from 2000 to 2019 and 171 countries, in an attempt to identify the relationship, should there be any, between a country’s level of democracy and its carbon dioxide emissions. Considering the rising prominence and growing urgency of the issue of climate change, identification of any such relationship, with the potential next step of learning more about the causal mechanism, could go a long way toward crafting more effective climate change policy. The models find a statistically significant positive relationship between democracy and carbon emissions, although with the important caveat that it is possible the variable of democracy has been subject to impacts of unobserved heterogeneity. Particularly with the huge variation of its estimates between geographic regions and income levels in mind, it is not appropriate to conclude that the identified relationship is of a causal nature. The author offers various potential explanation and interpretation of the ambiguous results, and reflected on the possible ways to improve the models going forward. Still with no consensus on the relationship in the academia despite more than two decades of research, the nuanced results of the paper in a way does not deviate from the norm, and represent yet another call for caution and a larger number of study in the field in future considering the rapidly rising salience of climate change as a prioritized policy issue. |
| Supervisor | Martin Kahanec |
| Department | Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/tse_tat-hong.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University