The Epidemiological Origin of Environmental Performance : The Role of Institutions in 122 Countries
The objective of this paper is to assess the role of institutional quality on the differential in current environmental performance following historical infectious disease prevalence. Based on the epidemiological origin of institutions, we propose a framework suggesting that, the impact of infectious disease prevalence on contemporary environmental performance is transmitted through property rights. Using data from 122 countries, we estimate a model through OLS. Our results provide strong and robust evidence on the importance of institutional quality in explaining environmental performance. Specifically, property rights are higher in countries where disease prevalence was low inducing good environmental performance scores. In contrast, countries with high disease prevalence did not have time to develop strong institutions to secure property rights. This explains their poor environmental performance today. These results are robust to several sensitivity tests and to the change in estimation method. Moreover, our results also confirm the level of development and the digitalization of economies as potential transmission channels between past diseases and the contemporary level of environmental performance
Year of publication: |
[2022]
|
---|---|
Authors: | OMBOLO MESSONO, OMANG |
Publisher: |
[S.l.] : SSRN |
Saved in:
freely available
Saved in favorites
Similar items by person
-
Historical prevalence of infectious diseases and gender equality in 122 countries
Messono, Omang Ombolo, (2022)
-
Historical technology and current economic development : reassessing the nature of the relationship
Mbassi, Christophe Martial, (2023)
- More ...