Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
compiled by Arthur Banks and listed attributes of the government systems
in almost all countries. The second was the Polity III database maintained
by Keith Jaggers and T.R. Gurr (1995) that had information on the politi-
cal systems of all countries with populations over 500 000. The data sets in
these two sources went back to the nineteenth century and up to the late
1990s.
He examined two environmental public goods; the rural population
with access to sanitation facilities and safe drinking water, using data from
the World Health Organization reported in the World Resources Institute
database. Deacon also examined two other public goods; roads and public
education. The data for roads were taken from the International Road
Federation and those for public education were taken from Banks. The
environmental policy measure he used was the lead content of gasoline
as reported by Octel Corporation. He showed that there was an inverted
U-shaped relationship between pollution and income, however, the shape
of the curve was determined by the form of government. In other words,
income elasticities of provision of public goods were af ected by the type
of governance. He concluded that income levels and government regimes
were highly correlated. He showed that incomes were higher in countries
with democratic governments than autocratic ones and environmental
quality tended to be lower in the latter. His explanations were that (1)
property rights were less dei ned and the rule of law was absent in less
democratic countries, which in turn suppressed investment in environ-
mental quality and other public goods, and (2) the governments were
generally corrupted, and hence drained any economic surplus that could
be produced by the private sector.
Barrett and Graddy (2000) made an attempt to determine the rela-
tionship between a selected number of air and water pollutants and per
capita income. The air pollutants were sulphur dioxide, smoke and heavy
particles, while the water pollutants were dissolved oxygen, biological
oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, nitrates, faecal coliforms, total
coliforms, lead, cadmium, arsenic, mercury and nickel. They relied on the
data used by Grossman and Krueger, which were gathered by the Global
Environmental Monitoring System and they added freedom variables that
were constructed from the civil and political indices developed by Freedom
House. The civil freedoms index rel ected constraints imposed on the level
of freedom of the press and individuals, while the political freedoms index
rel ected the level of freedom of choice of government, existence of opposi-
tion, and so on. The income data were taken from Summers and Heston
(1991) and were adjusted for dif erences in PPP.
Barrett and Graddy's hypothesis was that improvement in air and water
pollutants was due to improvement in the political system in a country,
