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Social Indicators Research

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25-08-2018

An Attitude Model of Environmental Action: Evidence from Developing and Developed Countries

Authors: Cristina Davino, Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi, Estefania Santacreu-Vasut, Radu Vranceanu

Published in: Social Indicators Research | Issue 2/2019

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Abstract

This paper analyzes the determinants of stated individual support towards environmental action. The analysis is realized by means of an original Partial Least Squares Path model of Environmental Awareness-Social Capital-Action and it is based on survey data provided in the fifth wave of the World Values Survey (2005–2009) regarding 34.612 individuals from 42 different countries. Besides the global estimates obtained on the whole set of countries, the paper proposes a subsample analysis for developed and developing countries, as well as country analyses for four major economies: China, India, Germany and the United States. We find that environmental awareness and trust in not-for-profit organizations are important determinants of individual action in support of environmentally friendly policies. In general, trust in science and technology does not crowd-out individual support towards the environment.

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This theory is related and inspired by Maslow (1943) hierarchy of needs argument, according to which people will seek to satisfy “superior” needs only after meeting the basic needs (e.g., shelter, food).

Recent estimates reveal that the share of carbon emissions emitted by the developed and the developing world is roughly equal, but the contribution of developing countries is expected to rise (The Economist 2015a, b).

Putnam (2001) referred to social capital as “connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them”.

An influential theory in environmental research developed in the 1970s analyses environmental degradation by the product of population size, consumption per capita (affluence), and the impact per unit produced as determined by technology.

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The sixth wave was completed in 2014, and the collection of data for the 7th wave started in 2016.

Previous research as discussed in Tietenberg and Lewis (2016) has shown that while these statements exaggerate the “true” willingness to pay for the environment, they are strongly correlated with the true willingness-to-pay and may serve as a reliable measure for policy evaluation purpose.

The exercise of grouping countries in categories is extremely difficult. The UN classification used in this paper does not rely solely on GDP but on many other variables, including political and societal variables.

This variable ranges from 0 to 10.

Actually, a further reflective variable is present in the model (awareness), but it is a superblock LV, combination of local and global awareness.

Bias-Corrected Bootstrap adjusts for bias in the bootstrap distribution and it is computationally faster but, in this application, it provided the same results as with the classical bootstrap. A further possibility is to use the bias-corrected and accelerated (BCa) bootstrap (Efron 1987) that is meant to adjust for both bias and skewness in the bootstrap distribution.

A weak relationship between the means of composites in PLSPM may be also due to data characterized by unequal variation of one LV for different ranges of other LVs. In such cases, quantile composite-based path modeling (Davino and Esposito Vinzi 2016) may be used as a way to discover other useful predictive relationships. This may represent a further development of this paper.

Further structural model assessment measures such as the redundancy and the effect size f2 are not provided because they are affected by the R2.

Permutations for multigroup analyses have been realized according to Chin and Dibbern (2010).

Actually, the importance represents the total effects, namely the sum of direct and indirect effects in the structural model. In the ESCA model, each LV just has direct effects on individual action represented by the path coefficients.

The results must be interpreted with caution because the data in each row are obtained with a different model.

As shown in this section, citizens in the developed world trust more in non-profit organizations (mainly NGOs), while citizens in developing countries trust more in for-profit organizations.

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Title: An Attitude Model of Environmental Action: Evidence from Developing and Developed Countries
Authors: Cristina Davino
Vincenzo Esposito Vinzi
Estefania Santacreu-Vasut
Radu Vranceanu
Publication date: 25-08-2018
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: Social Indicators Research / Issue 2/2019
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-018-1983-3

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