The Determinants of Environmental Policy Performance
Project no. 20551 · Status: Kapanmış · 2019
Summary
This study examines the participation of EU-28 countries in multilateral environmental agreements during the years 1995-2016 by using Multilevel Partial Credit Model from Item Response Theory family. The purpose of the study is to conduct a systematic analysis to evaluate the environmental treaty engagement performances of countries at first, and then identifying the underlying causes. MEAs are important policy instruments to shape global environmental strategies and to reach the environmental goals of our common future. For this reason, evaluating the performances of countries in terms of their desire to join the global environmental collaboration is a necessity. The major contribution of the paper is ranking environmental treaty engagement performances of countries by taking into account the complexity of agreement portfolios and countries’ adherence to the ratified agreements. The results reveal that treaty engagement performances of densely populated and high-income countries shaped by good governance with a focus on transparency, accountability, and adherence to the rule of law are relatively higher. JEL Codes: F53, Q5, O57, P16 Keywords: Item Response Models, Multilateral Environmental Agreements, Environmental Policy, Ranking, Democracy