Barriers to the Cross-Border Diffusion of Climate Change Policies

This paper hypothesizes and establishes empirically that climate change policies spread more easily between closely related countries, leading to worldwide differences in climate change policy performance. Exploiting variations across countries, the study provides evidence that genetic distance – a prehistorically determined measure of long-term relatedness between populations in terms of cultures, ancestry, and historical legacies – undermines national responses to changing climate conditions. The main findings arguably reflect the persistent influence of genetic distance on the global divergence in pro-environmentalism, the intergenerational transmission of collective climate action, and the cross-border diffusion of environmentally friendly goods and technologies