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Who Blames Corruption for the Poor Enforcement of Environmental Laws? Survey Evidence from Brazil
Abstract
Who blames corruption for the poor enforcement of environmental laws? The answer to this question is important since corruption is an important reason why environmental policies are not properly enforced, but previous studies of environmental public opinion do not address the issue. We analyze data from a survey fielded in Brazil in June 2012, immediately preceding the Rio+20 environmental summit. We test hypotheses on income, education, and perception of corruption as a cause of poor enforcement of environmental policy. We find that wealthy individuals are more likely to associate corruption with enforcement failure than poorer Brazilians. However, education is not associated with the belief that corruption is a primary cause of enforcement failure. These results suggest that since wealthy Brazilians have a higher exposure to corruption because of their interaction with government officials, they understand the role of corruption in policy failure. Conversely, the kind of general information that education offers does not raise concern about the role of corruption in environmental policy. The results have important implications particularly in democratic societies, where governments have stronger incentives to address the problem if concerned publics associate corruption with enforcement failure.
... Initially, oil was seen as a national security and economic growth factor. It was only in the third phase of environmental regulation in Brazil (after 1989) that environmental concerns became a major issue [9]. When these resources are seen as economic growth factors, governments aim to attract new investments and environmental issues tend to be overlooked. ...
... In fact, concerning environmental policy, there is a gap between existing legislations and its effective enforcement [9]. According to Clemente and Leão [10], although the country has high quality environmental regulations, they are not properly implemented. ...
... It is important to note that there is an important interconnection between some governance indicators. For example, corruption makes effective enforcement of environmental regulation harder [9] hindering regulatory quality, government effectiveness and rule of law. It is widely recognized that natural resources, namely non-renewable ones, can generate large economic rents, thus there is always an incentive for rent-seeking with a risk of corruption. ...
In this paper we analyze the role of governance quality on environmental policy in Brazil regarding natural resources exploration, particularly oil. Governance quality is reflected in five indicators following the approach of the World Bank: political stability, regulatory quality, government effectiveness, rule of law, and control of corruption. We highlight the main governance challenges faced by this country which can hinder environmental policy, particularly when they can influence oil exploration. The first problem detected is the political interference on environmental management. As governments change, so do environmental priorities, which raises immense costs. The second problem is that, despite the good environmental regulation, its effective implementation is hard. This happens due to low government effectiveness levels. Finally, the lack of political independence of environmental agencies increases the risk of corruption. Hence, it appears necessary for Brazil to carry out a self-assessment of its environmental policy and trace independent paths for technical and political resources management. Notwithstanding, we did not find an evident connection between the fluctuations in the governance indicators and data on oil production and CO2 emissions.
... Therefore, although compensation does not necessarily bring environmental benefits, it is a more economically viable compliance option for most landowners with vegetation deficits on productive agricultural land due to the substantial increase in land prices following the conversion of native vegetation to agriculture and positioning on fertile land [27]. While compensation strategies must rely on scientific ecological knowledge [28], on a political level, the dilemma between the economic and environmental factors of compensation acquires other aspects with various social pressures and possible occurrences of illicit acts [29][30][31]. Therefore, ecological compensation rarely achieves No Net Loss (NNL) [21,32], with frequent failures in Australia [33,34] and France [20] due to fluctuating regulations and weak support. ...
... Therefore, the study demonstrates that the increase in land prices after converting native vegetation and the productive gain establishes an environmental compensation strategy in which economic interests override ecological ones. This trend initially disregards the basic principles of ecological balance and progresses to eventual occurrences of illicit acts [27,[29][30][31]. This scenario of productive and financial advantages at the expense of sustainability and environmental preservation demonstrates the need to reevaluate compensation policies to ensure the adequate protection of natural ecosystems. ...
This research investigates the illegal Vegetation Suppression Authorization (VSA) for Legal Reserve Compensation (LRC) in Tocantins, Brazil, between 2012 and 2014. The VSA is a license issued by state environmental agencies that authorizes the removal or clearing of native vegetation. This infraction resulted from the state environmental agency’s mistaken interpretation of Resolution 07/2005 of the State Environmental Council and the Native Vegetation Protection Law, which operates nationally and takes precedence over state resolutions and laws. The study area focuses on eight municipalities contained in the Formoso, Pium, and Javaés river basins. The methodology examines irregular VSA-LRC cases through geospatial data analysis, multitemporal analysis using remote sensing data, and economic assessments in both the origin and destination areas of the compensatory reserve. The results showed that among the 217 VSA-LRC applications during the period, 93 had corresponding geospatial data, indicating that 57.1% of the geospatial data were missing. This discrepancy between the authorized area and the available geospatial information restricts the oversight capability of the regulatory agency. A decade-long deforestation analysis of VSA-LRCs using remote sensing data considered three phases: 2012–2014 (application and issuance of VSA-LRCs), 2015–2018 (operational issuance), and 2019–2022 (post-expiration of VSA-LRCs). The results revealed a total VSA-LRC area of 343.291 km² (34,329.10 ha), with 229.1169 km² (22,911.69 ha) of deforestation. Notably, 54.877 km² (5487.70 ha) of this deforestation occurred in 2019–2022, after the VSA-LRC had expired. The analysis of the LRC origin and destination areas demonstrates a unidirectional strategy, from economically more valuable areas to less valuable ones, according to land market dynamics. Therefore, this investigation concludes the need for greater administrative transparency, the development of a reliable geospatial data system for monitoring, and policy changes and actions to enhance environmental protection.
... GDP per capita for selected cities for 2008 (US dollars) 17 1.10 Cities and per person ecological footprint and bio-capacity 18 1.11 EF, HDI and GNI per capita (2017) 19 2.1 Carbon dioxide sequestration rates for different climates 25 3.1 CO 2 emissions for selected foods 30 3. 2 The energy generated from the same amount of land in different countries compared with one unit of energy from meat 30 3.3 ...
... The same source gives the area of Moscow as 2,511 sq.km and that of Greater Moscow as 26,000 sq.km. This makes the population density of Moscow 4,978 persons/ sq.km, which would lift its ranking to 11th in Table 1 (2,500) and Copenhagen and Sydney (2,100). Obviously, these figures hide very different distributions of space for many citizens of each city. ...
... Evidence on the relationship among law enforcement, criminal sentencing, offenders' behavior, and their socioeconomic conditions has consolidated in the last decade (Crow et al. 2013;Doerner and Demuth 2014;Johnson and Dipietro 2012;Kutateladze et al. 2014;Light 2014). Although there is increased attention to offenses against the environment (Aklin et al. 2014;Almer and Goeschl 2010;Blondiau et al. 2015;Cohen 1992;Faure and Svatikova 2012;Garcia and Fonseca 2018;Gray and Shimshack 2011;Lynch et al. 2016;Miller 2005;Rousseau 2009;Sjöberg 2016;South 1998), there are still significant gaps in the literature concerning the deterrence of environmental offenses. These gaps include the role played by court sentencing Cochran et al. 2018;O'Hear 2004) and prosecutorial failures (Cohen 1992;Lynch and Stretsky 2003;Simon 2000). ...
... 2 Current research on environmental violations and deterrence focuses on criminal prosecution, threat of imprisonment, spillover effects, corruption, the importance of local governments, and decentralized monitoring and enforcement (Almer and Goeschl 2010;Gray and Shimshack 2011;Faure and Svatikova 2012;Aklin et al. 2014;Blondiau et al. 2015;Sjöberg 2016;Lynch et al. 2016). ...
Objectives
This study examines the role of law enforcement procedures for environmental offenses. We test whether reaching the statute of limitations is associated with the recidivism of offenses against the flora in Brazil.
Methods
We analyze the universe of infractions issued by Brazil’s Federal Environmental Agency from 2000 to 2010 using survival analysis and reweighting methods.
Results
Findings indicate that reaching the statute of limitations in administrative procedures increases the risk of recidivism for individuals by 188% and firms by 34%.
Conclusion
Ineffective sentencing practices stimulate repeated offenses against the environment and have significant consequences for environmental degradation in Brazil, a country that is central for actions to mitigate global environmental change.
... Given the context described above, we argue that corruption, as an indicator of institutional weakness, could be related to the firm's decision to invest less in energy efficient equipment because corruption weakens the enforcement of the environmental regulations and law (Aklin et al., 2014). Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the role of corruption in small and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) to engage in energy efficient investments. ...
... For example, corruption could increase emissions directly by reducing the stringency of environmental regulations and weakening their enforcement (e.g. Aklin et al., 2014). Corruption also impacts emissions indirectly through its effect on per capita income (Cole, 2007). ...
Energy efficiency is an important issue for developing countries like Vietnam, where the economy is thriving, but energy efficiency is still low. Firms should invest in energy efficiency measures, but the desired level is not reached. While the economic determinants of firms’ investments in energy efficiency have been researched, the role of the institutional setting has not gained so much attention. By employing data from Vietnamese small and medium-sized enterprises that has been administered in 2015, this article investigates how corruption, as a sign of institutional dysfunctionality, is associated with the energy efficiency in firms. Results of a bivariate binary probit estimation revealed that bribery increases the likelihood of energy efficiency environmentally friendly investments. However, findings from instrumental variable two stage least squares estimations demonstrate that bribery increases the cost of the investments. Hence, in the long run, corruption might have a deterring effect on energy efficiency investments by firms.
... In the international literature, the analysis is very often based on reflections of the Brazilian society, the perception of corruption and the role of information (Weitz & Winters, 2017;Winters & Weitz, 2013, 2014Aklin, 2014;Fischer, 2014). If and how the detection of corrupt practices has a significant influence on the voting behavior, is one of the key questions in recent political science studies (e.g., Winters & Weitz, 2015;Aklin, 2014;Fischer, 2014). ...
... In the international literature, the analysis is very often based on reflections of the Brazilian society, the perception of corruption and the role of information (Weitz & Winters, 2017;Winters & Weitz, 2013, 2014Aklin, 2014;Fischer, 2014). If and how the detection of corrupt practices has a significant influence on the voting behavior, is one of the key questions in recent political science studies (e.g., Winters & Weitz, 2015;Aklin, 2014;Fischer, 2014). ...
Brazil has a myriad of corruptions scandals in its recent history. Nonetheless, research on the organizational level of corruption is underdeveloped. The paradigm of individual deviance related to wealth grabs hardly applies to the ‘active corruption’ of the bribe giver, as seen in recent cases exposed by Operation Car Wash. The holding Odebrecht S.A is at the heart of these scandals. In these cases of bribery, most of the bribe givers are high-ranking, well-educated, and well-paid managers. They are highly connected with public agents and their actions are in line with the company’s goals. We perform an autopsy of the Odebrecht Case and briefly outline what mechanisms and factors on corporate level bolstered a pattern of endemic systemic corruption in the construction sector in Brazil. Our purpose is to contribute to the bigger discussion of corporate crime without overlooking criminological and polity’s perspective, but providing an approach from sociology of organizations. We analyse strengths and weaknesses of regulative institutions and the environmental conditions under which the Brazilian construction company operated and interacted both with its competitors and with public institutions. Based on the judicial documents about Odebrecht and its employees, we reconstruct the factors and mechanisms that are central to organizational deviance and provide an overview of the consequences for the company
... Similar trends in poor implementation are seen elsewhere. In Brazil, for example, corruption is closely linked to poor policy implementation and lack of adherence to environmental laws and is commonplace in many developing nations (Aklin et al., 2014). Jordan (1999) also highlights poor implementation of environmental policy in developed nations within the EU. ...
... The gaps identified here are relevant to many countries globally, including South Africa, covering a broad range of social-ecological and economic contexts (e.g. Raphael et al., 2010;Liquete et al., 2013Aklin, 2014. All of the key needs are issues faced by developed and developing countries to varying degrees as supported by their various case studies mentioned above. ...
... The Indian census defines slums as "residential areas where dwellings are unfit for human habitation by reasons of dilapidation, overcrowding, faulty arrangements and design of such buildings, narrowness or faulty arrangement of street, lack of ventilation, light, or sanitation facilities or any combination of these factors which are detrimental to the safety and health" [26]. 1 Based on 2011 census data, slums hosted about 68 million Indians (over 5% of the total Indian population and 17% of the urban population), and the number was growing. 2 As urbanization continues unabated in India, the number of slum dwellers is expected to continue to increase. In the absence of significant policies which would improve the living conditions in these areas, people will continue to live at risk of poor health, violence, and poverty [37]. ...
... Corruption reduces the quality of public services. It has been related to poor energy and environmental governance [1,14,24]. Instead of being used to design and enforce good regulations, resources are diverted to the personal profit of bureaucrats. These have then little incentives to remedy these problems [27]. ...
... Because Brazilian environmental policies are not adequately enforced and agencies have limited resources for surveillance, there is a large lack of compliance and impunity for environmental crimes, such as illegal hunting. In addition, corruption in agencies intensifies poor enforcement of environmental laws (Aklin et al., 2014). Thus, it is urgent to improve law enforcement efforts. ...
Globally, illegal sport hunting can threaten prey populations when unregulated. Due to its covert nature, illegal sport hunting poses challenges for data collection, hindering efforts to understand the full extent of its impacts. We gathered social media data to analyze patterns of illegal sport hunting and wildlife depletion across Brazil. We collected data for 2 years (2018–2020) across 5 Facebook groups containing posts depicting pictures of illegal sport hunting events of native fauna. We described and mapped these hunting events by detailing the number of hunters involved, the number of species, the mean body mass of individuals, and the number and biomass of individuals hunted per unit area, stratified by Brazilian biome. We also examined the effects of defaunation on hunting yield and composition via regression models, rank–abundance curves, and spatial interpolation. We detected 2046 illegal sport hunting posts portraying the hunting of 4658 animals (∼29 t of undressed meat) across all 27 states and 6 natural biomes of Brazil. Of 157 native species targeted by hunters, 19 are currently threatened with extinction. We estimated that 1414 hunters extracted 3251 kg/million km². Some areas exhibited more pronounced wildlife depletion, in particular the Atlantic Forest and Caatinga biomes. In these areas, there was a shift from large mammals and reptiles to small birds as the main targeted taxa, and biomass extracted per hunting event and mean body mass across all taxonomic groups were lower than in other areas. Our results highlight that illegal sport hunting adds to the pressures of subsistence hunting and the wild meat trade on Brazil's wildlife populations. Enhanced surveillance efforts are needed to reduce illegal sport hunting levels and to develop well‐managed sustainable sport hunting programs. These can support wildlife conservation and offer incentives for local communities to oversee designated sport hunting areas.
... For example, according to Fredriksson et al. (2004), corruption reduces investment incentives in renewable energy sources and has no positive effect on energy efficiency. By impeding the effective adoption of green policies that support the development of renewable energy, corruption encourages an increase in CO2 emissions (Cole, 2007;Aklin et al., 2014). The relationship between green finance, renewable energy, and the environment is thus dependent on the governance quality levels used to implement green finance policies effectively. ...
The importance of green finance in combating climate change has generally been recognized by governments across the globe in recent years. However, depending on the quality of governance and human capital level, unregulated green policies may have counterintuitive effects on environmental quality. Thus, this study illustrated how human capital and good governance moderate the ecological impact of green finance in China, the world's largest CO2 emitter. We used the moments-quantile method with fixed-effect models and several spatial econometric estimators in multivariate models on data from 1992Q1 to 2020Q4. Initially, we demonstrated how human capital development and sound governance helped green finance lower CO2 emissions. Second, in Central and Western China-where, unlike Eastern China, human capital levels and governance quality were above optimal thresholds-green finance marginally enhanced environmental quality. Third, in contrast with Eastern China, the combined impacts of human capital, green finance, and high-quality governance on the environment rose more in high-polluting provinces than in low-polluting areas, with larger magnitudes in Western China. Lastly, there were negative spatial spillover effects on CO2 emissions from green finance, human capital, and governance quality. Nonetheless, as opposed to Western China, their synergy-that is, the interaction terms-had positive spatial spillover effects on the CO2 emissions of the neighboring provinces of the Eastern and Central regions. As such, we provide some policy suggestions for China's sustainable development, thereby establishing China as an invaluable reference point from which other countries can adapt their eco-friendly policies.
... Governments face complex decision-making processes, balancing economic development with environmental sustainability. LAC governments may face challenges maintaining political stability and popular support while implementing remedies potentially disrupting powerful vested interests associated with extractivism, a relationship that fosters corruption (Aklin et al. 2014). For instance, remedies that aim to protect indigenous peoples' rights and territories may be perceived as threatening the smooth operation of an extractivist actor (McNeish 2018). ...
The climate crisis will continue to affect human and natural systems across Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). Undoubtedly, this jeopardizes entire communities’ enjoyment of human rights. In that context, the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) is expected to respond, particularly since its organs have jurisdiction to order remedies over most LAC countries, provided they determine a rights violation. Despite the growing number of domestic human rights-based climate cases in the region, the organs of the IAHRS have yet to adjudicate and order remedies in a case concerning the climate crisis. Against this backdrop, this article inquires how to understand climate remedies from a political ecology perspective to capture the LAC climate litigation experience. Additionally, the article asks what the challenges of implementing such remedies may be. To answer these questions, first, it compares the remedial approaches of domestic courts in six finally decided climate-related cases with those of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) in ‘anti-extractivist’ cases. Second, it applies a political ecology lens to understand the elements that might hinder the implementation of the identified remedies. The article argues that the socioeconomic cost for States largely determines remedial compliance in domestic climate litigation and the IACtHR’s anti-extractivist litigation. Ultimately, the aim is to anticipate the future of climate remedies and their effectiveness at the IACtHR based on present climate litigation in LAC.
... Here, Fu and Jian (2021) find that the hypothesis's significance is detected in China when controlling for corruption, which is common in developing countries. Studies over the past two decades indicate that corruption breeds looser environmental regulations, resulting in increased pollutant emissions and reduced economic growth (e.g., Welsch (2004), Pellegrini and Gerlagh (2006), Aidt (2011) and Aklin et al. (2014)). This suggests that corruption may play a crucial role in the Porter hypothesis. ...
The Porter hypothesis is not very statistically significant, especially in developing countries. This is likely because it overlooks environmental-policy-related bribes, and reducing the regulatory cost burden through bribes can encourage innovation. Moreover, the more competitive are the international markets, the more likely is it for firms to bribe officials in making export decisions. This study identifies a theoretical mechanism for this hypothesis by analyzing the effects of trade environmental policies and bribes associated with tax evasion on pollution, growth, and productivity in an R&D-based growth model considering exporting firms that engage in environmental tax evasion. The analysis yields a weak Porter hypothesis wherein an increase in environmental tax for exporting firms leads to economic growth and pollution reduction. Then, the greasing-the-wheel-of-trade and sanding-the-whole-of-trade hypotheses are compatible. The different results of trade and environmental policies’ effects on each developing country’s green innovation are likely due to the political institutions’ maturity.
... Existing work on the impact of corruption on environmental outcomes highlights the role of electoral incentives in ensuring the enforcement of environmental regulations (Aklin et al. 2014). This is in line with more general arguments about the ability of electoral accountability to generate effective enforcement and reduce the impact of corruption (Hurwicz 2008;Olken and Pande 2012). ...
While existing work has demonstrated that campaign donations can buy access to benefits such as favorable legislation and preferential contracting, we highlight another use of campaign contributions: buying reductions in regulatory enforcement. Specifically, we argue that in return for campaign contributions, Colombian mayors who rely on donor-funding (compared with those who do not) choose not to enforce sanctions against illegal deforestation activities. Using a regression discontinuity design, we show that deforestation is significantly higher in municipalities that elect donor-funded as opposed to self-funded politicians. Further analysis shows that only part of this effect can be explained by differences in contracting practices by donor-funded mayors. Instead, evidence of heterogeneity in the effects according to the presence of alternative formal and informal enforcement institutions, and analysis of fire clearance, support the interpretation that campaign contributions buy reductions in the enforcement of environmental regulations.
... To be considered legitimate, enforcement processes and outcomes must be perceived to be effective and fair (Nielsen, 2003;Pinkerton and John, 2008). External context-specific factors (Ramcilovic-Suominen and Epstein, 2012) such as bribery and corruption (Aklin et al., 2014;Enrici and Hubacek, 2016;Erdmann, 2001;Sundström, 2016), poverty (Dasgupta, 2000), and property rights (Ramcilovic-Suominen and Epstein, 2012) also influence compliance. Violating environmental regulations are often the only means for livelihood survival (Ha and van Dijk, 2013;Monzón-alvarado et al., 2014;Ostermann, 2016); hence authorities' reluctance to apply strict obedience on the poor (Nolte, 2016;Thung, 2018). ...
Wildfires, including on carbon-rich peatlands, continue to haunt Indonesia every dry season. They have disastrous health, economic, environmental, and climate consequences. As a key measure to manage wildfires, laws strictly prohibit the burning of land and forests, targeting corporate and individual fire users. The literature suggests that weak law enforcement contributes to Indonesia's persistent wildfires but it lacks systematic analysis. Centred on villagers, this research examines 1) how enforcement of the burning prohibition plays out in practice, by analysing each step along the enforcement chain, and 2) how enforcement has shaped villagers' compliance with the fire rules, and implications for them. We interviewed villagers and enforcement agents and analysed court documents of the year 2019 fire cases. We focused on two fire-prone provinces with extensive peatlands, South Sumatra and Central Kalimantan. We found that some villagers have complied and ceased burning, while others have continued to use fire to maintain their livelihoods. Enforcement contributed to fire prevention, but may have also increased fire risks thus limiting the prevention effect. A multitude of challenges, including physical obstacles, resource constraints, and governance reduced enforcement effectiveness. Key to enforcement is legitimacy of the rule being enforced from the perspective of both enforcement agents and target actors. Investments are required to support viable alternative no-burning cropping methods. At the same time, public awareness raising and long-term education are essential for accidental fire prevention and the reduction of overall enforcement costs.
... These structural challenges which characterize environmental law enforcement efforts in developing countries (Aklin et al., 2014) appear to support the finding by Kennedy (2010) that the existing environmental regulatory framework is insufficient to achieve the sustainable environmental outcomes desired by many (especially developing) countries like Nigeria and Brazil. It also suggests that legislation and regulation are unlikely, by themselves, to positively influence environmental attitudes or change environmental beliefs and behaviors among Nigerian citizens, including those in the Niger Delta region. ...
This article argues that a community-based social marketing (CBSM) framework can support an environmental health communication and advocacy campaign in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. First, the personal and group environmental attitudes and behavior in the region are identified. Next, a summary is provided of the underlying sources, types, and magnitude of the region’s environmental challenges from oil production agriculture, and illegal logging. Using grounded theory, a CBSM strategy is proposed for enhancing environmental attitudes and behavior for promoting environmental health in Nigeria’s Niger Delta. The analysis identified specific behavior change necessary to improve environmental conditions, themes and resources, including groups and institutions that could be considered as assets, as well as potential barriers to implementing CBSM in the Niger Delta. It also identified the need to combine the CBSM with the social ecological model to make it effective for framing appropriately targeted pro-environmental communication addressing complex socio-political problems.
... 129 The country faces serious issues related to corruption, which makes the enforceability of laws and regulations a real problem, and the consequence is the existence of good legislation that is not being complied with and the environmental results are not being achieved. 130 In terms of SDG 14, life below water, the analysis is more complex than the previously analyzed SDG 6. 131 In a report published by the Applied Economics Research Institute from Brazil (IPEA in Portuguese, 2019), targets 14.1, 14.2, 14.7, and 14c do not have a global methodology to measure them. 132 Target 14.3 (minimize and address the impacts of ocean acidification, including through enhanced scientific cooperation at all levels), 14.6 (degree of implementation of international instruments aiming to combat illegal, unreported and unregulated fishing), 14a (proportion of total research budget allocated to research in the field of marine technology), and 14b (provide access for small-scale artisanal fishers to marine resources and markets) have a known methodology, but there is not enough data in the country, although 14.6 is under construction along with 14b. ...
... In Brazil, there is an important difference between the existence of policies aiming to reduce deforestation and the enforcement of these policies. While Brazil is considered to have one of the strictest environmental law systems in the world, it faces enormous challenges with enforcement [125,126]. Data availability is a challenge in highlighting this important nuance: while data on the existence of environmental laws at the municipal level is readily available, the quality of enforcement at this level is more difficult to measure. Rather than measuring the existence of environmental laws, government agencies may consider sharing metrics related to law enforcement outcomes, such as arrests made and successful prosecutions. ...
Deforestation continues at rapid rates despite global conservation efforts. Evidence suggests that governance may play a critical role in influencing deforestation, and while a number of studies have demonstrated a clear relationship between national-level governance and deforestation, much remains to be known about the relative importance of subnational governance to deforestation outcomes. With a focus on the Brazilian Amazon, this study aims to understand the relationship between governance and deforestation at the municipal level. Drawing on the World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) as a guiding conceptual framework, and incorporating the additional dimension of environmental governance, we identified a wide array of publicly available data sources related to governance indicators that we used to select relevant governance variables. We compiled a dataset of 22 municipal-level governance variables covering the 2005–2018 period for 457 municipalities in the Brazilian Amazon. Using an econometric approach, we tested the relationship between governance variables and deforestation rates in a fixed-effects panel regression analysis. We found that municipalities with increasing numbers of agricultural companies tended to have higher rates of deforestation, municipalities with an environmental fund tended to have lower rates of deforestation, and municipalities that had previously elected a female mayor tended to have lower rates of deforestation. These results add to the wider conversation on the role of local-level governance, revealing that certain governance variables may contribute to halting deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon.
... In addition, our approach offers a distinct contribution to the study of environmental policy from a political economy perspective. Scholars of environmental policy have long recognized that political favoritism and lax enforcement of rules are potential threats to environmental protection (Woods 2008;Fredriksson and Vollebergh 2009;Aklin et al. 2014;Oliva 2015). Studies have not, however, managed to pinpoint exactly how political economy factors compromise environmental regulation. ...
Does political alignment at different levels of government influence centralized bureaucratic processes? Environmental clearances are important regulatory tools that allow governments to target the distribution of public goods/bads by both controlling negative externalities and allocating rents from project developers. While commentators advocate for central authorities to control environmental licensing of major projects, in emerging markets with weak formal institutions, it is still possible for local politicians to influence this process. We use data on environmental clearances in India for thermal (primarily coal-fired) power plants between the years 2004 and 2014 to test whether local legislators influence an otherwise bureaucratic process in which they play no formal role. Using a regression discontinuity design, we find that partisan alignment with the state chief minister results in a sharp increase in local clearance applications. This is consistent with the hypothesis that this type of political influence “greases the wheels” of bureaucracy by facilitating more environmental approvals, rather than creating regulatory bottlenecks. Our results contribute to a growing literature that suggests that lower-level politicians can still exert influence on the policy process despite having few institutionalized powers.
... The mechanism between corruption and carbon emissions Current research on the relationship between corruption and carbon emissions has been abundant. Most prior study supports the positive effect of carbon emissions (Rehman et al. 2012;Aklin et al. 2014;Dincer and Fredriksson 2018). The possible explanations are as follows. ...
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Existing research on the relationship among corruption, energy efficiency, and industrial carbon emissions is limited, while incorporating them into one analytical framework might provide new insights for the mechanism between corruption and industrial carbon emissions. Using the provincial panel data in China’s industry from 2005 to 2015, this study applies the System Generalized Method of Moments (SYS-GMM) to explore the impacts of corruption and energy efficiency on industrial carbon emissions. The results indicate that under current economic development status, the effects of corruption and energy efficiency on industrial carbon emissions are divergent; i.e., corruption can enhance carbon emissions, whereas energy efficiency facilitates carbon emission reduction. Energy efficiency plays a mediating role in the relationship between corruption and carbon emissions for both the whole sample and the sub-samples. In other words, corruption aggravates industrial carbon emissions through lowering energy efficiency. Additionally, for the eastern region in China, there is an inverted U-shaped curve relationship between corruption and carbon emissions, as well as a U-shaped curve relationship between energy efficiency and carbon emissions. For the other regions, there is little sign of nonlinearity. Based on the results, policy implications regarding carbon emissions curbing are proposed.
... A high level of corruption does not stimulate energy efficiency, and it disrupts any incentive for investments in renewable energies (Fredriksson et al., 2004). It also favors the increase of carbon dioxide emissions by hindering the appropriate implementation of environmental regulations promoting renewable energy consumption (Cole, 2007;Aklin et al., 2014). For instance, corrupt public institutions can tolerate the embezzlement of funds that could serve as subsidies, incentives for companies to use renewable energy technologies in their daily activities. ...
This study analyses the conditional effect of governance quality on the finance‐renewable energy‐growth nexus in 123 countries from 1990 to 2017. We built composite indexes of financial development and governance quality through the principal component analysis (PCA) using several financial variables and governance indicators. We employed the generalized method of moments (GMM) and the two‐stage least squares (2SLS) techniques, but also the Granger non‐causality in Dumitrescu and Hurlin (2012). First, the disaggregated analysis shows that renewable energy consumption, financial inclusion, financial efficiency, and financial stability have positive marginal effects on economic growth under a good governance quality, except for financial depth. Second, the aggregated analysis confirms the positive marginal impact of financial development on growth only in low‐income economies, whereas renewable energy consumption has positive marginal effects only in lower‐middle‐income and upper‐middle‐income economies. Finally, the results of the causality analysis differ among countries. Overall, governance quality has a threshold effect on the finance‐renewable energy‐growth nexus, which varies across countries. Accordingly, our study suggests more improvements in the governance quality in these countries, especially in the low‐income and high‐income countries, to enhance the marginal impacts of financial development and renewable energy consumption on growth.
... A variety of policy interventions have been formulated and researched to overcome the barriers hampering low-carbon technology diffusion (Tian et al., 2014;Zhao et al., 2016;Fan et al., 2017;Tong et al., 2019;. Researchers also show interest in environmental policy failures (Aklin et al., 2014;Edner, 2014;Mackie, 2016;Dangi et al., 2017;Ortmann, 2017;Portman and Teffseker, 2017;Sharma, 2017), which mainly emphasize the key factors of policy implementation. However, even if well implemented, environmental policies might cause unexpected and undesirable issues. ...
Policy interventions are frequently used by authorities around the world to mitigate carbon emissions. However, economic systems are essentially complex adaptive systems, which often exhibit unexpected responses to exogenous interventions and leave intervenors in a dilemma, even if the interventions are elaborately designed. To explore the behaviors of the diffusion system regarding low-carbon technologies, this study builds an agent-based model (ABM) to simulate enterprises’ reactions to multiple policy interventions aimed at spurring low-carbon technology diffusion. The simulated enterprises are in a complex network where they play evolutionary games with their neighbors, which enables the model to possess two critical features of economic systems: adaptiveness and equilibrium. The model reveals a dilemma of policy interventions: intuitively, carbon taxes, asymmetric penalties (only imposed on un-low-carbon enterprises) and subsidies can improve the diffusion, which is consistent with previous research; counter-intuitively, all these policies turn out to be inefficient or even harmful to low-carbon enterprises because of the diffusion system’s high adaptiveness. Specifically, when carbon taxes and penalties increase, both the low-carbon and un-low-carbon enterprises end up with the equilibrium of equivalent but lower profits. In contrast, all the enterprises earn equivalent but more profits even though subsidies are only given to the low-carbon enterprises, which implies that the un-low-carbon enterprises (indirectly) grab a portion of the subsidies and accordingly weaken the incentive effect of subsidies. These system behaviors are summarized as “equalizing effect” because the system tends to equalize the impact of both positive and negative interventions among all enterprises even though the policy interventions are asymmetrically imposed on one type of the enterprises. The findings also indicate that policies implemented to enlarge green market sizes can help policymakers bypass the dilemma.
... The increases in these three variables have worsened the environmental quality by 1.045%, 0.115% and 0.770%, respectively.Similar to the Malaysian and Indonesian outcomes, corruption rates at the authority level have caused the country to experience more illegal factory activities that have led to higher environmental pollution. These activities might be due to poor enforcement of environmental regulations, as explained by Aklin et al. (2014) and Welsch (2004). Furthermore, the growing number of financial institutions in the Philippines could mean higher credit accessibility for these businesses to run their unauthorised operations. ...
This paper has examined the short-run and long-run relationships between economic growth, energy consumption, foreign direct investment, trade openness, financial development, corruption, urban population and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in three developing countries of ASEAN, i.e. Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines (ASEAN–3), with data from 1970 to 2017. Special emphasis has been given to the level of corruption in these three countries as several recent media releases have reported that many firms have been conducting unlawful activities by importing large amounts of waste from developed countries and these wastes, including plastic waste, have been burnt in open spaces and have caused higher releases of carbon emissions. Long-run elasticity results have proven that the higher level of corruption in these three ASEAN countries has caused more environmental pollution. Meanwhile, other tested variables have shown mixed findings across the three tested countries. Improvement of institutional quality is urgently needed for ASEAN-3 countries by adopting more transparent laws and the imposition of heavier penalties on corrupt officials and even on the entrepreneurs who have engaged in unlawful business activities that have caused higher environmental pollution.Keywords: Environmental Quality, Corruption, Bound Estimation, ASEAN-3.JEL Classifications: F64, O57, P28DOI: https://doi.org/10.32479/ijeep.8135
... Ineffective enforcement of environmental policies in Brazil is also a major limitation, since it does not obviously contribute to increased compliance or behavioural change (Barreto et al., 2009;da Silva and Bernard, 2016). Moreover, corruption is perceived by many Brazilians as the main cause of poor enforcement of environmental laws (Aklin et al., 2014). ...
In Brazil most forms of hunting and keeping of wild animals are illegal, although they remain widely practiced and are deeply culturally embedded in many regions. The drivers of such widespread non-compliance are poorly understood and evidence to support future policy decisions is generally lacking. In this paper, we seek to stimulate a critical debate on how to deal with hunting in Brazil by analysing the main factors driving non-compliance with current legislation. This is particularly timely given that several amendments to existing legislation are currently under consideration. Our analysis suggests that, while there are no simple solutions to non-compliance, a targeted suite of the following policy options could improve the monitoring, sustainability and conservation consequences of hunting in Brazil: (i) simplifying the process to become a registered subsistence hunter; (ii) expanding participation in licensing schemes; (iii) investing in pilot studies and assessing their environmental and socioeconomic impacts; (iv) expanding community-based management programmes; (v) trailing education and social marketing campaigns. These policy options are geographically and social-context specific and would be most effectively be implemented at regional or sub-regional scales. © 2019 Associação Brasileira de Ciência Ecológica e Conservação
... As the education system is considered a socio-economic system, we can note a number of works that highlight key problematic aspects of the impact of changes on the socio-economic systems' development . Nowadays it is impossible to study the education system's development without paying attention to the influence of the contact audience (stakeholders), whose theoretical aspects of existence are described in the works (Abramov & Sokolov, 2016;Aklin et al., 2014;Freeman, 1984;Factor & Kang, 2015;Fedotova & Platonova, 2014;Fedotova & Chigisheva, 2015;Hokayem & Gotwals, 2016;Lehrer & Schauble, 2015;Mendelow, 1991;Post et al., 2002;Sokolov, 2016;Spector, 2016;Walker, 2016;Sanin, 2009;Kramin & Kramina, 2011;Tazhitdinov, 2013). However, despite the existence of various studies concerning the nature of the gaps in socio-economic systems, the aspect of emergence, development and consequences of gaps in the higher education system in Russia is being insufficiently explored, as well as the role of stakeholders in all of this. ...
... In addition, corruption has been associated with poor enforcement of environmental regulations (e.g. Aklin et al., 2014;Welsch, 2004), which further strengthens its increasing impact on emissions. Thus, both grand and petty corruption are relevant to pollution from the point of view of the effectiveness of environmental policy (Wilson and Damania, 2005). ...
This paper examines the causal relationships between economic growth, energy consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in high-income and upper-middle-income countries using the simultaneous equations framework, with data from 1985–2011. By taking institutional quality (measured by the level of corruption) and climate (measured by average temperatures over the winter and summer months) into account, this is the first study to incorporate both of these factors into a simultaneous equations model within the energy-environment-growth nexus. The dependent variables in the system of three simultaneous equations are real gross domestic product (GDP), energy consumption and CO2 emissions as a proxy for air pollution. The results have two important implications. First, they document a bidirectional causal relationship between GDP and energy consumption but do not provide support for the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. This is revolutionary in the sense that it indicates that high-income and upper-middle-income countries base their economic growth on a feedback relationship with energy consumption and that the ensuing pollution has not yet reached a maximum point, even in these countries. Second, by implying that climate and weather variations are more important determinants of energy consumption and CO2 emissions than corruption, the results suggest that changes in institutional quality are likely to have only a limited impact on energy and environmental policies.
... tino de las transacciones comerciales ilícitas (Reuter, 2017). Si bien los tres países cuentan con leyes específicas de control y protección medioambiental, la escasez de recursos administrativos para el monitoreo y regulación junto con las prácticas de corrupción han permitido que todas estas actividades económicas no sean eficazmente penalizadas (Aklin, et.al. 2014). ...
Illicit economies such as illegal extractivism of natural resources or wildlife trafficking are new challenges for governability. From this starting point, the research aims to analyze social, political, environmental, economic and normative factors of the informal economies in the Amazon basin. The emphasis is placed on the triple border between Brazil, Peru and Colombia, in relation to its impact on political institutionalism. The application of a qualitative analysis based on primary sources infers that policy measures and regulations attuned to environmental crime to ensure social control and protection of biodiversity are still scarce.
... More generally, the implementation of coercive strategies opens a space for corruption since the decision to report/prosecute may be financially negotiable in some cultures (Jin-Li, Huang, & Chu, 2004). In other words, if officials are willing to shut their eyes (for a price), local people can easily avoid fines without needing to change their behaviour (Aklin, Bayer, Harish, & Urpelainen, 2014). ...
Non-compliance with conservation regulations is a key issue for protected area management effectiveness in most parts of the world. Effectively managing such behaviours requires a clear understanding of who is non-compliant, what is driving their non-compliance, and what the likely conservation consequences of compliant and non-compliant behaviours are. However, such information is notoriously difficult to obtain due to the (understandable) reluctance of transgressors to discuss illegal activities. Here, we adopt the Kiping social survey method to assess the drivers of non-compliance with resource use rules in two national parks (Catimbau and Chapada Diamantina) in Northeast Brazil. The method is therefore used to support the exploration of suitable solutions for coping with non-compliance on the ground. We found high levels of social acceptability for illegal behaviours in both Parks, though hunting and cutting trees inside the park were viewed more negatively by local residents. Respondents from both areas generally supported the collection of plants and firewood, especially by poor people and local residents. Acceptance of illegal activities was statistically correlated with awareness of park regulations in both parks and, in Catimbau NP, it was also prevalent among older, poorer and less educated residents. To deter non-compliance, a mix of interventions from more coercive measures to softer instruments are recommended, especially in Catimbau NP where the area is not patrolled and the close proximity of indigenous lands gives rise to land- and resource-use conflicts.
... However, this study omits corruption in their analysis. Yet, Aklin et al. (2014) claim that corruption matters since its effects on environmental quality may be significant and are perceived differently varying with income and wealth levels of citizens. Grafton and Knowles (2004), on the other hand, analyze the importance of social capital on environmental quality. ...
This study found that doubling the level of democracy in Latin America reduces CO2 emissions per capita by up to 6%. This relationship is estimated by using a fixed effects panel system of equations for 19 Latin American countries, between 1995 and 2008. Democracy acts as a conduit for increasing demands on environmental quality in Latin America, due to urban population growth and economic prosperity. Nevertheless, this study has, at least, two caveats: first it cannot unveil the long run relationship between democracy and environmental quality in the region; and, secondly, this study assumes that democracy entails positive outcomes for countries adopting this political system.
This research study analyses the vital role of legal and institutional frameworks in preventing corruption related to social and environmental reporting that adheres to promoting the fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals, also known as the SDGs, of the United Nations. Corruption provides a tremendous barrier to sustainable growth initiatives, particularly in the areas of social and environmental accounting, since it impacts accountability, transparency, and integrity. By examining existing literature, this study intends to highlight the key problems and best practices in preventing dishonesty, improving good governance, and boosting the efficiency of environmental and social accounting procedures. Ultimately, this research aims to provide knowledge and suggestions for governments, corporations, and stakeholders to boost the campaign against corruption and promote the SDGs.
Brazil maintains its position at the top of the global ranking of plastic producers, yet recycling efforts have been incipient. Recent data reveals an annual production of approximately 14 million tons of plastic waste, not accounting for the surge in the usage of plastic masks and related materials due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, what remains largely unreported is that over half of post-consumer plastic packaging in Brazil is managed without any monitoring, and it remains unclear how this will contribute to the occurrence of plastic waste and microplastics in Brazilian freshwaters. This scenario requires the consideration of several other crucial factors. Studies have been carried out mainly in marine and estuarine waters, while data on freshwaters are lacking. Brazil has continental dimensions and the highest water availability on the planet, yet the demand for water is greatest in regions with medium to low supply. Many densely populated Brazilian urban areas face chronic flood problems, possess inadequate levels of wastewater treatment, and display inadequate solid waste management practices. Consequently, urban freshwater with tropical characteristics in Brazil presents an intriguing scenario and is complementary to the most commonly studied marine environments. In this study, we explore the nuances of pollution in Brazilian urban freshwater and discuss how various parameters, such as organic matter, suspended solids, temperature, and pH, among others, influence the behavior of microplastics and their interactions with organic and inorganic contaminants. Furthermore, we address how microplastic conditions, such as biofouling, the type of plastic, or degradation level, may impact their behavior. By analyzing how these conditions change, we propose priority themes for investigating the occurrence of microplastics in Brazilian urban freshwater systems under different degrees of human impact. Ultimately, this study aims to establish a network dedicated to standardized monitoring of microplastic pollution in Brazilian urban freshwaters.
In response to the recent growth of multitudes of theoretical literature analysing the corruption impact on the economy and environment, this paper subjects the corruption–carbon emission relationship in China to a detailed empirical examination through the autoregressive distributed lag modelling approach and panel quantile regressions. Based on panel data from Chinese provinces, spanning the period 1998–2016, this study explores the impact of long- and short-term corruption on per capita carbon emissions by considering the heterogeneous distribution of those emissions. The results document that corruption increases per capita carbon emissions in Chinese provinces in the short run, reducing per capita carbon emissions in the long run. Moreover, an increase in corruption leads to an increase in carbon emissions per capita in all quantiles, indicating that these emissions increase with corruption severity. The coefficients in low quantiles are slightly larger than those in high quantiles, indicating that corruption leads to more carbon emissions in provinces with lower per capita carbon emissions.
Purpose
The purpose of this study is to investigate how state regulations become ineffective in holding corporations accountable for environmental degradation in an emerging economy context, with a specific focus on oil and gas and cement industry in Nigeria.
Design/methodology/approach
The study draws on capture theory to bring out the factors that have rendered redundant the state intervention to make corporations accountable for their environmental activities. The research setting is the oil and gas and cement industry in Nigeria. Data for the study are derived from both documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews and analysed using a thematic technique.
Findings
The findings of the paper demonstrate a regulatory failure to hold corporations to account for their environmental activities. A lack of political will, outdated regulations and the manipulation of the regulators, all have played a part in preventing corporations from being accountable for their activities. In addition, the widespread elite corruption in the country has provided corporations with leeway to manipulate their environmental accountability practices. The study emphasises the need for continuous review of the regulations and efforts to reduce corruption in order to promote corporations' environmental accountability in Nigeria.
Research limitations/implications
The research is limited to Nigeria, oil and gas and cement industries. The theoretical lens can be used to address problem of capture of the regulations and institution in the country.
Practical implications
The practical implication is that it would enhance environmental regulations in Nigeria and emerging economies. It will also provide support from researchers emerging markets on the adoption of capture theory in future research.
Social implications
It will promote corporate best environmental practices in the country. It will reduce the issues surrounding environmental accountability practices and create awareness on environmental issues among the populace. It will create the impression that corporations will be held accountable for their environmental activities in the country and the need to have improved environmental regulations in the country.
Originality/value
The study adds to the debate on corporate environmental accountability practices engendering insights from the Nigerian oil and gas and cement industry. The paper demonstrates how companies in emerging economies can capture state regulations and how rendering environmental accountability becomes more of rhetoric than a reality with little impacts on the welfare of people and society.
This paper aims to examine the informal mechanisms and factors of corporate crime in Brazil that contribute to the persistence of political corruption. For this analysis, official records, e.g. closed criminal trials produced by Operation Carwash, one of the biggest cases of white-collar crime and political corruption in Brazil's history, will be used. The focus of the analysis is on the criminal trials, generated in the early phases of the investigation, which revealed the illegal activities of large Brazilian construction companies as well as its cartel-building to defraud the Petrobras' contracts. The analysis on the modus operandi of this cartel served to reconstruct the unwritten rules inside organizations that are involved in the bribery-scheme. The analysis showed that Brazilian private enterprises, represented by its senior executives and top managers, used the lack of regulation and informal rules, rooted in the political system, to achieve illegal profits.
Using a sample of 4195 observations from 19 emerging markets, we investigate how internal corporate governance, external monitoring, and legal and business environment jointly affect a firm's managerial effectiveness in environmental information transparency in an international setting. The empirical results show that in emerging economies, firms with stronger corporate governance mechanisms tend to adopt an external control strategy in order to mitigate owner-manager agency conflicts. Furthermore, internal corporate governance mechanisms are found to directly increase firm transparency concerning environmental damage and to indirectly do so through external control device. The legal and business environments of countries in which firms operate moderate these relationships.
Maintaining human cooperation in the context of common-pool resource management is extremely important because otherwise we risk overuse and corruption. To analyse the interplay between economic and ecological factors leading to corruption, we couple the resource dynamics and the evolutionary dynamics of strategic decision making into a powerful analytical framework. The traits of this framework are: (i) an arbitrary number of harvesters share the responsibility to sustainably exploit a specific part of an ecosystem, (ii) harvesters face three strategic choices for exploiting the resource, (iii) a delegated enforcement system is available if called upon, (iv) enforcers are either honest or corrupt, and (v) the resource abundance reflects the choice of harvesting strategies. The resulting dynamical system is bistable; depending on the initial conditions, it evolves either to cooperative (sustainable exploitation) or defecting (overexploitation) equilibria. Using the domain of attraction to cooperative equilibria as an indicator of successful management, we find that the more resilient the resource (as implied by a high growth rate), the more likely the dominance of corruption which, in turn, suppresses the cooperative outcome. A qualitatively similar result arises when slow resource dynamics relative to the dynamics of decision making mask the benefit of cooperation. We discuss the implications of these results in the context of managing common-pool resources.
The Rio Paraiba do Sul is a highly polluted river in south central Brazil, that is contaminated by industrial, agricultural and municipal wastes, as well as being impacted by dams, water withdrawals and deforestation in the watershed. Since only very intensive and farreaching environmental policies could result in water quality improvements, valuing the restoration of the river presents many unique challenges. We develop a choice-modeling approach to valuation of the restoration of this river, with general tightening of environmental policy as the policy, and an increase in prices as the payment vehicle. The estimation is performed in willingness to pay space, adjusting for heterogeneity of tastes. We find that respondents, who are primarily low income, exhibit higher willingness to pay for complete restoration than moderate restoration, higher for moderate restoration in comparison to minimal restoration, and that they prefer restoration sooner, rather than later.
A two-player model is established in order to examine the effects of environmental policy instruments, budget control, and bribery on decision making of local government and the firms. With or without bribery, the central government can always promote the abatement input by stipulating a higher marginal budget reward for the local government. Bribery can cause policy failure for some environmental instruments such as fines and local fine shares. In a clean society, a higher local fine share or higher fines will unambiguously increase pollution abatement. In a corrupt society, a higher local fine share or higher fines may reduce pollution abatement. With or without bribery, a stricter emission standard has an ambiguous effect on pollution abatement.
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Few studies have explored on the micro-level why corruption hampers environmental regulations. The relationship between corruption and regulatory compliance is here investigated through confidential in-depth interviews with South African small-scale fishermen. Respondents describe how the expected behavior of inspectors and other resource users to ask for or accept bribes are vital in their compliance decisions. The interviews also shed some light on the puzzling role of trust and trustworthiness of public officials. While resource users often knows inspectors personally - and uphold discretion necessary for bribery to continue - they depict them as dishonest and describe how corrupt acts decrease their trustworthiness. The findings from the South African case illustrate the importance of curbing both grand and petty corruption to increase the effectiveness of regulations in natural resource management.
Efforts to explain environmental concern as a function of social structure have revealed some weak but reliable associations. Stronger associations have been found between environmental concern and social psychological variables including attitudes, beliefs, and worldviews. The authors used the 1993 General Social Survey to explore a conceptual framework that postulates four causal levels: social structural factors and early socialization experiences; general worldview and ideology about humanity and the environment; specific attitudes, beliefs, and cognitions about environmental issues; and environmentally relevant behavior. Each class of variable has explanatory power beyond that given by other classes of variables, with the social psychological variables generally adding more explanatory power than the structural variables. The patterns are different, however, for the five behavioral indicators. Efforts to explain the structural influences as indirect, operating through the social psychological variables, were mainly unsuccessful.
Citizens' concerns about (international) environmental protection standards are of increasing importance to governments in industrially advanced, high-regulating countries. In almost any proposal for a trade agreement, countries with low environmental regulation standards are required to introduce higher policy standards in exchange for high-regulating countries dismantling their trade barriers and granting access to their domestic markets. Low-regulating countries often act as required and introduce legislation aimed at reducing pollution. This leads to declaratory or de jure policy convergence. But such legislative action is not always associated with de facto or actual policy convergence, since policies are not always enforced. In order to analyze the strategic aspect of this potential "slippage", we set up a simple game-theoretic model with imperfect information. In the model, a high- regulating and a low-regulating country negotiate a bilateral free trade agreement with environmental provisions. We show how potential gains from trade, policy enforcement, and reputation costs, as well as domestic demands for environmental protection a!ect the occurrence of environmental policy convergence through conditional trade agreements. This study thereby advances our understanding of the relationship between bilateral trade and convergence of environmental policies.
This article argues that income inequality increases the level of corruption through material and normative mechanisms. The wealthy have both greater motivation and more opportunity to engage in corruption, whereas the poor are more vulnerable to extortion and less able to monitor and hold the rich and powerful accountable as inequality increases. Inequality also adversely affects social norms about corruption and people's beliefs about the legitimacy of rules and institutions, thereby making it easier for them to tolerate corruption as acceptable behavior. This comparative analysis of 129 countries using two-stage least squares methods with a variety of instrumental variables supports the authors' hypotheses using different measures of corruption (the World Bank's Control of Corruption Index and the Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index). The explanatory power of inequality is at least as important as conventionally accepted causes of corruption such as economic development. The authors also found a significant interaction effect between inequality and democracy, as well as evidence that inequality affects norms and perceptions about corruption using the World Values Surveys data. Because corruption also contributes to income inequality, societies often fall into vicious circles of inequality and corruption.
Knowledge and motivational factors represent important but neglected topics in the study of recycling behavior. This article examines differences in knowledge, motives, and demographic characteristics of people who have the opportunity to recycle voluntarily. Information on these variables was obtained for 197 households in Illinois. The results indicated that recyclers in general were more aware of publicity about recycling and more knowledgeable about materials that were recyclable in the local area and the means for recycling these materials than were nonrecyclers. While both recyclers and nonrecyclers were motivated by concerns for the environment, non-recyclers were more concerned with financial incentives to recycle, rewards for recycling, and with matters of personal convenience. Few demographic characteristics distinguished recyclers from nonrecyclers.
Theoretical and empirical studies have shown that democracy
and corruption influence environmental policies. In this chapter, we empirically analyse the relative importance of these determinants of environmental policy. When these variables are jointly included as explanatory variables in a multiple regression analysis, we find that corruption stands out as a substantial and significant determinant of environmental policies, while proxies for democracy
have an insignificant impact. Nevertheless, democracy
could affect environmental policy stringency
given that countries with a history of democratic rule tend to be less corrupt (see Chap. 3). A discussion of our results in the context of the Environmental Kuznets Curve literature follows. We argue that improving environmental quality following increasing income is less probable in developing countries with institutional disarray. Finally, and more optimistically, when considering our results in the context of institutions and growth, we conclude that there is scope for reaping a double dividend: reductions in corruption induce higher economic growth rates and stricter environmental policies.
Used the questionnaires to study the effects of political party preferences and political ideologies on the environmental actions and attitudes of 300 undergraduates at a state university in Oregon. (237 usable responses were received.) It is noted that, in 1970 when the questionnaires were administered, environmental issues were very prominent on this campus. It was predicted that Ss with Democratic party preferences and liberal political ideologies would exhibit higher rates of pro-environmental attitudes and actions than Ss with Republican preferences and conservative ideologies. Among those indicating a traditional party preference, the Democratic party was heavily favored over the Republican party--101 (68.2%) vs 47 (31.8%). 66 Ss (28.8%) designated themselves as liberals, 112 (48.9%) as moderates, and 51 (22.3%) as conservatives. 56.2% indicated great interest in environmental issues, and 50% indicated that they had taken at least one positive environmental action. Correlational analyses supported the hypotheses, and indicated that Democratic and liberal Ss were more likely to locate the sources of environmental problems in the nature of contemporary social structure than Republican and conservative Ss who were more likely to view environmental degradation as a "people problem." Data on strategies for solving environmental problems and perceived seriousness of these problems are also presented. (45 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A model is developed that hypothesizes 2 types of consistency: consistency in the intercorrelations among environmental measures and consistency in the correlations between the environmental measures and various sociodemographic variables. 806 Washington State residents were administered the Environmental Regulations Scale, Environmental Spending Scale, and Environmental Behavior Scale. Results show little support for the assumption that all environmental concern measures are equivalent. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Abstract Using data obtained from National Opinion Research Center's General Social Surveys (1973–1990), this paper tests two hypotheses concerning possible changes in the sociopolitical correlates of environmental concern. The “broadening base” hypothesis predicts that environmental concern will diffuse throughout the populace, resulting in a broader base of support for environmental protection, while the “economic contingency” hypothesis predicts that the economically deprived will disproportionately withdraw support for environmental protection during poor economic conditions. Analysis of the data over the 18 years, however, failed to lend any clear support for either of the hypotheses. In marked contrast, results indicate that the social bases of environmental concern—at least as measured by the NORC environmental spending item—have remained remarkably stable over nearly two decades despite fluctuating economic, political, and environmental conditions. Younger adults, the well-educated, political liberals, Democrats, those raised and currently living in urban areas, and those employed outside of primary industries were found to be consistently more supportive of environmental protection than were their respective counterparts.
We produced estimates of the total number of species currently known and the total numbers predicted to occur in Brazil. Lists of species recorded in Brazil were obtained from specialists and the literature. For taxa lacking information on total known species, we produced estimates based on bootstrap resampling from a set of 87 taxa with checklists for Brazil and the world. The estimated proportion of Brazilian species was 9.5% of the world total (95% CI, 8.5 to 11.5%). From this we estimated a known Brazilian biota of 170,000 to 210,000 species. We used a similar procedure to estimate Brazil's total biota—known plus undiscovered. Based on 17 relatively well-known taxa, the average Brazilian share in the world's biota was estimated at 13.1% (CI 10.0 to 17.6%). Accordingly we estimated the country's total biota at 1.8 million species (CI 1.4 to 2.4 million). Given that the Neotropics is the least-studied major region of the world, these figures are still likely to be underestimates and hence may be taken as a lower bound of the actual proportion of the world's species that occur in Brazil. Scientists, policy makers, and citizens will find these numbers useful in appreciating the magnitude of the tasks involved in surveying, describing, and conserving the country's biota. The numbers also bring proposals and priorities into a more realistic perspective.
This article discusses the determinants and the development of public concern for the state of the natural environment. First,
we review some theoretical approaches that try to explain individual as well as cross-national differences in environmental
attitudes. Particularly, we discuss Inglehart's theory of post-materialism, Dunlap and Mertig's globalization explanation,
and the prosperity hypothesis. Second, we test these hypotheses by applying multilevel analysis to the International Social
Survey Programme (ISSP) data from the years 1993 and 2000. The results support, above all, the prosperity hypothesis. Individuals
with higher relative income within countries display higher levels of environmental concern than their compatriots, and additionally,
more concern is reported in wealthier countries than in poorer nations. The results indicate that environmental concern is
also closely associated with post-materialistic attitudes and various socio-demographic variables. Comparing the environmental
concern measured in the ISSP in 1993 with that in 2000 shows that environmental concern has more or less stabilized since
the early 1990s in the countries under scrutiny.
This article describes and analyzes major laws, decrees, regulations, resolutions, and institutional mandates linked to environmental protection policies in Brazil, from 1934 to 2002. It argues that many early regulations resulted basically from centralization and planning policies conducted by a development-oriented state. However, it shows that most recent regulations were demanded by a more environmentally aware and more organized civil society, in the context of a more participatory and democratic political framework and improved scientific knowledge and requirements.
How does corruption interact with inequality? To answer this question, we employ afield experiment that examines the manner in which police officers in a major Latin American city respond to socioeconomic distinctions when requiring a bribe. In this experiment,four automobile drivers commit identical traffic violations across a randomized sequence of crossroads, which are monitored by transit police. We identify the effect of citizens' perceived wealth on officers' propensity to solicit bribes and oil the size of the bribes that they solicit. We complement our experimental results With qualitative findings from interviews with police officers. Our core finding is that officers are more likely to target lower class individuals and let more affluent drivers off with warnings. The qualitative results suggest that Officers associate wealth with the capacity to exact retribution and therefore are more likely to demand bribes from poorer individuals. We conclude that a multimethod approach provides a richer account Of corrupt behavior than that found in most contemporary research.
With endangered status and more than 8,000 endemic species, the Atlantic Forest is one of the world's 25 biodiversity hotspots.Less than 100,000 km² (about 7%) of the forest remains. In some areas of endemism, all that is left are immense archipelagos of tiny and widely separated forest fragments. In addition to habitat loss, other threats contributing to forest degradation include the harvesting of firewood, illegal logging, hunting, plant collecting, and invasion by alien species—all despite the legislation that exists for the forest's protection. More than 530 plants and animals occurring in the forest are now officially threatened, some at the biome level, some throughout Brazil, and some globally. Many species have not been recorded in any protected areas, indicating the need to rationalize and expand the parks system. Although conservation initiatives have increased in number and scale during the last two decades, they are still insufficient to guarantee the conservation of Atlantic Forest biodiversity. To avoid further deforestation and massive species loss in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, the challenge is to integrate the diverse regulations, public policies, new opportunities, and incentive mechanisms for forest protection and restoration and the various independent projects and programs carried out by governments and nongovernmental organizations into a single and comprehensive strategy for establishing networks of sustainable landscapes throughout the region.
Brazil's Amazon forest remained largely intact until the "modern" era of deforestation began with the inauguration of the Transamazon Highway in 1970. Amazonian deforestation rates have trended upward since 1991, with clearing proceeding at a variable but rapid pace. Although Amazonian forests are cut for various reasons, cattle ranching predominates. The large and medium-sized ranches account for about 70% of clearing activity. Profit from beef cattle is only one of the income sources that make deforestation profitable. Forest degradation results from logging, ground fires (facilitated by logging), and the effects of fragmentation and edge formation. Degradation contributes to forest loss. The impacts of deforestation include loss of biodiversity, reduced water cycling (and rainfall), and contributions to global warming. Strategies to slow deforestation include repression through licensing procedures, monitoring, and fines. The severity of penalties for deforestation needs to be sufficient to deter illegal clearing but not so great as to be unenforceable. Policy reform is also needed to address root causes of deforestation, including the role of clearing in establishing land claims.
Although Brazil's first park was established in 1937, the past two decades have witnessed an explosion of protected areas. Until 1989 federal parks and reserves were created by the Brazilian Forest Development Institute (IBDF) and the Special Secretariat for the Environment (SEMA). In 1989 SEMA and IBDF were united to form the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA). A formal, unified system for federal, state, and municipal parks, the National System for Protected Areas, was made law in 2000. In 1976 IBDF drew up a biogeographical model for siting protected areas for biodiversity conservation in the Amazon, based on representation of phytogeographic regions. There are three ongoing initiatives to determine the location of new protected areas: (1) protected areas were recommended for the majority of 900 priority areas for biodiversity conservation identified in workshops held for Brazil's major biomes (1998–2000); (2) establishment of biodiversity corridors with parks and reserves as key elements; and (3) the creation of protected areas in the 23 Amazonian ecoregions identified by World Wildlife Fund—Brazil (the ARPA program). Federal and state strictly protected areas now number 478 and total 37,019,697 ha, and there are 436 sustainable-use areas totalling 74,592,691 ha. Other categories of protected areas in Brazil include private natural heritage reserves (RPPNs), which are generally small but proving important for the conservation of restricted-range and highly threatened species, and indigenous reserves, which are increasingly recognized as vital for biodiversity conservation because of their enormous size. Although Brazil has created an enormous number of protected areas over the last two decades, enormous challenges remain—not only for their administration and management—but also to protect the parks themselves as Brazil continues with its ambitious developmental programs for energy, infrastructure, industry, and agriculture.
Resumen: Aunque los el primer parque de Brasil fue establecido en 1937, las dos últimas décadas han atestiguado una explosión de áreas protegidas. Hasta 1989, los parques federales y reservas fueron creados por el Instituto Brasileño de Desarrollo Forestal (IBDF) y la Secretaría Especial del Medio Ambiente (SEMA). En 1989 SEMA e IBDF fueron unidos para formar el Instituto Brasileño para el Ambiente y los Recursos Naturales Renovables (IBAMA). En 2000, se estableció legalmente un sistema formal, unificado para parques federales, estatales y municipales, el Sistema Nacional para Áreas Protegidas. En 1976, IBDF adoptó un modelo biogeográfico para situar áreas protegidas para conservación de biodiversidad en la Amazonía, basado en la representación de regiones fitogeográficas. Actualmente están en curso tres iniciativas para determinar la ubicación de nuevas áreas protegidas: (1) se recomendó el establecimiento de áreas protegidas en la mayoría de las 900 áreas prioritarias para la conservación de la biodiversidad que fueron identificadas en talleres sobre los principales biomas de Brasil (1998-2000); (2) establecimiento de corredores de biodiversidad con parques y reservas como elementos claves; y (3) la creación de áreas protegidas en las 23 ecoregiones amazónicas identificadas por el Fondo Mundial para la Vida Silvestre–Brasil (el programa ARPA). Actualmente, hay 478 áreas federales y estatales estrictamente protegidas que abarcan un total de 37,019,697 ha, y hay 436 áreas de uso sustentable que totalizan 74,592,691 ha. Otras categorías de áreas protegidas en Brasil incluyen la Reserva Privada de Patrimonio Natural (RPPN), generalmente pequeña pero importante para la conservación de especies muy amenazadas y con distribución restringida; reservas indígenas, cada vez más reconocidas como vitales para la conservación de biodiversidad debido a su gran extensión. Aunque Brasil ha protegido una superficie enorme en las dos últimas décadas, hay enormes retos no solo para su administración y manejo, sino especialmente para proteger a los parques mismos ya que Brasil continúa con sus ambiciosos programas de desarrollo para energía, infraestructura, industria y agricultura.
It is widely assumed that public concern for environmental quality is dependent on affluence, and is therefore stronger in wealthy nations than in poor nations. This assumption is tested via results from a 1992 international survey conducted by the George H. Gallup International Institute that obtained data on a wide range of environmental perceptions and opinions from citizens in 24 economically and geographically diverse nations. Aggregate, national-level scores for a variety of measures of public concern for environmental quality were created and correlated with per capita gross national product. Although the results vary considerably depending upon the measure, overall national affluence is more often negatively rather than positively related to citizen concern for environmental quality—contradicting conventional wisdom.
We carried out online choice experiments (CE) to investigate what value Japanese individuals assign to rare versus familiar species in forest ecosystem, and to determine how preference heterogeneity arises. CE attributes comprised a forestry charge as the price attribute and rare versus familiar species of animals or plants as the good to be valued. Species numbers in a 5 km-mesh forest area were evaluated without the use of species names to focus purely on responses to numerical changes. Positional effects were also tested to validate results regarding alternatives and attributes other than the price attribute. A random parameter logit model was adopted to capture preferences for species diversity. After confirming that no positional effects existed, we found that (1) rare animals were valued more highly than rare plants, (2) familiar plants were assigned a positive value, but familiar animals were not assigned significant value at the mean parameter estimate, and (3) preference heterogeneities existed for all species. The sources of preference heterogeneity were analyzed with a latent class model having principal components of environmental attitudes. The influence of such attitudes was shown to be significant and suggested that attention should be paid to belief systems rather than solely demographics.
Since the first environmental movement, a variety of conditions have influenced the Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations’
strategies and decisions. This diachronic evolution is dictated by the motivations and the objectives of the environmental
groups. Following a review of the literature, an analytical framework for studying targets or motivations of the environmental
groups and members is analysed. Environmental Non-Governmental Organisations not only cooperate, but also compete each other.
This competition together with the members’ motivations can determine not only the success of the groups, but also the groups’
efforts for survival and future actions. Additionally, an important relation exists between the groups and the level of donations
by governments and individuals. Finally, three interrelated factors that affect the strategy and the decisions of the group
are identified: the group’s size, their budget, and the weight of impure altruism in their individual and collective objectives.
A positive relation exists between the group’s size and the financial contributions, and the interaction of the personal expectations
with the collective objectives encourages and benefits the group’s actions.
KeywordsEnvironmental groups–Motivations–Size–Budget–Impure altruism
A study of the ecological foundations of political systems and a detailed analysis of how a particular Third Word political system, Brazil's, addresses environmental issues, this book explores the institutional and political dimensions of environmental problems in developing countries. The author discusses the theoretical linkage between ecology and political science, presents a unique historical analysis of those linkages in Brazil, and looks at the structure for environmental policy formation and implementation in Brazil through a case study of the Special Secretariat for the Environment. Because Brazil is one of the world's fastest-growing economies, the study of its ecopolitics sheds light on crucial dimensions of the debate over development and the environment. -from Author
In our article entitled “The Social Bases of Environmental Concern: A Review of Hypotheses, Explanations and Empirical Evidence”
(POQ 44:181–97), two rows of correlations were reversed in Table 1. Under the study by Van Liere and Dunlap, 1978, figures for
the environmental funding scale appear where figures for the environmental regulations scale should be, and vice versa. We
regret the error and hope it has not caused undue confusion for anyone using these data.
Representing the first comprehensive study of its kind, this book evaluates the comparative performance of national environmental policies since the beginning of the modern environmental era. Unlike other comparative studies, it looks directly at the purpose of environmental policy: pollution reduction. Lyle Scruggs presents four major explanations of environmental performance which it evaluates through the comparative statistical analysis of data from seventeen affluent countries. The results often challenge conventional explanations of good performance.
Brazil has long ago removed most of the perverse government incentives that stimulated massive deforestation in the Amazon in the 1970s and 1980s, but the highly controversial policy concerning road building still remains. While data is now abundantly available due to the constant satellite surveillance of the Amazon, the analytical methods typically used to analyze the impact of roads on natural vegetation cover are methodologically weak and not very helpful in guiding public policy. This article discusses the respective weaknesses of typical geographic information system (GIS) analysis and typical municipality-level regression analysis, and shows what would be needed to construct an ideal model of deforestation processes. It also presents an alternative approach that is much less demanding in terms of modeling and estimation and is more useful for policymakers.
We examine the reduced-form relationship between per capita income and various environmental indicators. Our study covers
four types of indicators: urban air pollution, the state of the oxygen regime in river basins, fecal contamination of river
basins, and contamination of river basins by heavy metals. We find no evidence that environmental quality deteriorates steadily
with economic growth. Rather, for most indicators, economic growth brings an initial phase of deterioration followed by a
subsequent phase of improvement. The turning points for the different pollutants vary, but in most cases they come before
a country reaches a per capita income of $8000.
Environmental ministries have become increasingly common, but the determinants of their global spread remain only partially understood. We develop a theory of domestic–international interactions in the global adoption of environmental ministries. We argue that domestic factors can sensitize a country to different types of international influence: foreign pressure, external support for capacity building, and learning effects. Empirically, we examine the global spread of environmental ministries, 1960–2009. We find that countries have strong incentives to establish environmental ministries when they are undergoing a democratic transition and environmental problems are salient at the international level. In other words, the democratization of a country allows international factors to promote the formation of a national environmental ministry. The findings contribute to the study of domestic–international linkages and help understand global trends in environmental governance during a period of unprecedented environmental destruction.
Policies designed to solve environmental problems are unlikely to succeed unless they have broad public support, but the motives for mass support are poorly understood. The problem is global in scope, but most of the relevant public opinion research done so far has been carried out in advanced industrial societies, usually Western democracies. Moreover, much of this research is limited to the tip of the iceberg, focusing on what people think about environmental problems without probing into why they think it or how deeply they are committed.
The analysis of mass attitudes toward environmental problems in this article uses evidence from representative national surveys of countries representing the entire developmental spectrum, from rich to poor nations, including not only Western democracies but authoritarian regimes and recently emerging democracies from the former communist bloc. The data come from the 1990–93 World Values survey, carried out in 43 countries containing 70% of the world's population. Our goal is to determine why given publics are—or are not—sufficiently concerned about environmental problems that they are willing to make financial sacrifices and undertake other actions in order to help protect the environment.
Conventional wisdom says corruption is bad for income inequality. But recent research on Latin America finds a trade-off between corruption and inequality and suggests this is due to the large informal sector in the region. Using data on a large sample of countries we find that the informal sector impacts the link between corruption and inequality. In particular, the marginal impact of corruption becomes negative once the informal sector becomes large. This is true in Latin America and more generally. Corruption reducing policies should be accompanied by measures that help displaced informal sector workers.
We use data on households’ bribery of public officials in Peru and Uganda to analyze the distribution by income of the burden of bribery, the mechanisms leading to it, and the payoffs to bribery. We show the burden of bribery is not borne disproportionately by the poor. Among bribers, the poor do pay a greater share of their income than the rich, but the rich use officials more often, and among users, the rich are more likely to bribe. The benefit of bribery is avoidance of the poor service delivered to clients who refuse to bribe.
This research examines changes in the environmental coalition over the 1980s. During these years, concern over environmental problems has increased. How has the coalition favoring greater environmental protection changed? We use logistic regression to examine changing determinants of support for increased environmental spending. In brief, ideology, party identification, and age become less important as determinants, and education and urban residence become more important. The implications are discussed.
A social-psychological model is developed to examine the proposition that environmentalism represents a new way of thinking. It presumes that action in support of environmental quality may derive from any of three value orientations: egoistic, social-altruistic, or biospheric, and that gender may be implicated in the relation between these orientations and behavior. Behavioral intentions are modeled as the sum across values of the strength of a value times the strength of beliefs about the consequences of environmental conditions for valued objects. Evidence from a survey of 349 college students shows that beliefs about consequences for each type of valued object independently predict willingness to take political action, but only beliefs about consequences for self reliably predict willingness to pay through taxes. This result is consistent with other recent findings from contingent valuation surveys. Women have stronger beliefs than men about consequences for self, others, and the biosphere, but there is no gender difference in the strength of value orientations.
Although ignorance and corruption play some role in the waste of natural resources, the principal cause often lies elsewhere.
Relatively little information yet exists regarding gender differences in environmental concern and activism. What information is available has so far provided a mixed picture, with some studies indicating men to be more concerned than women, others indicating women to be more concerned, and still others finding no significant differences. This study provides additional evidence from national survey data. From these data, women were found to express greater concern for the environment than men before and after applying multivariate controls for age, education, labor force/homemaker status, and other variables. However, the magnitude of the differences was not great. Gender differences in environmental activism provided an ironic contrast. Even though women indicated somewhat greater concern, rates of environmental activism for women were substantially lower than for men. Furthermore, these differences were greater than differences in rates of general political participation and persisted in spite of multivariate controls for socioeconomic status, homemaker status, and other variables. That the environmental activity of women appears to be constrained by factors in addition to those constraining general political activity is similar to earlier findings regarding the environmental activity of blacks. Common threads in these findings are explored.
Social Scientists rarely take full advantage of the information available in their statistical results. As a consequence, they miss opportunities to present quantities that are of greatest substantive interest for their research and express the appropriate degree of certainty about these quantities. In this article, we offer an approach, built on the technique of statistical simulation, to extract the currently overlooked information from any statistical method and to interpret and present it in a reader-friendly manner. Using this technique requires some expertise, which we try to provide herein, but its application should make the results of quantitative articles more informative and transparent. To illustrate our recommendations, we replicate the results of several published works, showing in each case how the authors' own conclusions can be expressed more sharply and informatively, and, without changing any data or statistical assumptions, how our approach reveals important new information about the research questions at hand. We also offer very easy-to-use Clarify software that implements our suggestions.
Brazilian politicians have long relied on pork and clientelism to win political support, and recent literature suggests that little has changed. However, researchers have yet to systematically investigate whether political criteria influence the distribution of funds through Bolsa FamÃlia. This is especially surprising given the program’s prominence in the international community. In this paper, I examine whether political criteria explain the federal government’s distribution of Bolsa FamÃlia. I find little evidence that political criteria explain the difference between the number of poor families that live in a municipality and the number of families that receive support. I conclude by discussing the broader significance of this large, programmatic policy to Brazil’s political development.
Economists have long warned about the pernicious impacts of corruption, arguing that it increases transaction costs, reduces investment incentives, and ultimately results in reduced economic growth. Political scientists, on the other hand, ever the realists, have had a much more ambivalent view of the problem. Indeed, much classic literature focusing on the Third World saw corruption as functional for political development, enabling citizens to overcome intransigent, inefficient bureaucracies while increasing loyalty to the political system. More recent research, however, points in the opposite direction toward an erosion of public support for corrupt regimes. A series of serious methodological problems has prevented the testing of these contradictory assertions about the impact of corruption. This article uses national sample survey data, with a total N of over 9,000, from four Latin American countries to test the effect of corruption experiences on belief in the legitimacy of the political system. It finds that independent of socioeconomic, demographic, and partisan identification, exposure to corruption erodes belief in the political system and reduces interpersonal trust. The evidence seems clear, at least for these four countries, that corruption carries with it important political costs.