The Political Economy of the Environment

Citation

Stern, D.I. (2004), "The Political Economy of the Environment", International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 31 No. 4, pp. 443-445. https://doi.org/10.1108/03068290410523449

This book is a collection of mostly previously published essays and papers by James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts – the introductory and final chapters are new. Unlike many books of this genre, however, it has a strong coherent theme and the chapters have been edited and cross‐referenced – collection of the essays into a single slim volume adds considerable value.

That theme is about putting power and distributional issues center‐stage in the study of environmental and resource economics, which are usually characterized by a primary focus on efficiency. When equity appears in mainstream environmental and resource economics it is mainly in the investigation of the implications of policies to correct environmental problems or in the study of their political feasibility. Environmental problems are not usually seen as arising from distributional inequities or conflicts. The view that they do arise from distributional conflicts is familiar in the transdisciplinary field of ecological economics.

Professor Boyce's work is an excellent example of how ecological economics can be done in an objective, evidence‐based approach that can put issues on the agenda in a manner where they will be taken seriously by other scholars.

The approach is explicitly anthropocentric – development of food crops is described as an environmental improvement – and, as in neoclassical economics, outcomes for individual people is the focus of analysis. The underlying premise, however, is a rights‐based approach where every individual is deemed to have an equal right to a clean and safe environment. This viewpoint, the author believes, is gaining over the view that privileges existing property rights.

The view that distribution and power is at the heart of the environmental problem is based on the following observation. The wealthiest 20 percent on Earth have incomes averaging 140 times those of the poorest 20 percent. For a variety of reasons, we can assume that a dollar of consumption by the rich has less environmental impact than one dollar's worth of consumption by the poor. But it is unlikely to have only 1/140th of the impact. Therefore, it is clear that the environmental impact of the wealthy must be greater than that of the poor on a per capita basis. The existence of open‐access resources allows those with the wealth and the power to appropriate the use of those resources for their needs and to “steal” them from the poor who do not willingly consent to that use. Power is wielded in a variety of modes, not only through purchasing power, but also by the molding of agendas and values and control of government patronage and favor. Boyce implies that where the powerful are negatively affected by the activities of the less powerful, the market failure will be corrected speedily and effectively, but where the poor and powerless are affected this is less likely to be the case. Of course, as Boyce points out, neoclassical environmental economics posits that the efficient level of pollution with the market failure corrected may still be greater when the poor suffer from pollution than when the rich suffer from pollution as the poor are less able, and therefore willing, to pay to avoid or reduce the pollution.

The corollary is that where society is more equal and more democratic the quality of the environment will be better than where power and wealth are more unequally distributed. He tests this hypothesis on a widely used international dataset in a chapter on the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, co‐authored with Mariano Torras. Proponents of the EKC argue that environmental degradation tends to rise in the early stages of economic development, when countries are “too poor to be green” and falls in the later stages of economic development when wealth can be diverted to environmental clean‐up. Boyce and Torras find that variables relating to inequality, literacy, democracy etc. have the effects that they expected on a variety of pollutants. I (and many others) have strongly criticized the EKC model on econometric (and other) grounds (e.g. Perman and Stern, 2003; Stern and Common, 2001). In particular, variables such as income per capita are non‐stationary and, in the absence of cointegration, regression results are not reliable. This criticism can be applied to Boyce's study too. The political power variables are however fixed in each country and interpretation of their effect may be more reliable than that of the income variables.

A chapter co‐authored with Klemer, Templet, and Willis tests similar hypotheses in a cross‐section of the 50 US states. A recursive model tests the effects of income and race on the distribution of power, the effect of the distribution of power on environmental policy, environmental policy on environmental stress, and environmental stress and power on health outcomes (some control variables are also included). The results were all as expected by the authors suggesting that an unequal distribution of power leads to inferior health outcomes via its effect on environmental policy and through other avenues. Again, econometric criticisms could be made but the overall pattern is suggestive.

The book contains three case studies: deforestation in the Philippines, jute vs polypropylene, and maize grown in Mexico vs maize produced in the USA. The first of these is a fairly familiar story. The latter two cases are examples of where Boyce argues that production in the developed country – polypropylene or intensive maize farming – has greater environmental impacts than production in the developing country – jute growing in Bangladesh or peasant farming of genetically diverse varieties of maize in Mexico. Under free trade, developing country production is declining, or threatened with decline, as production costs are higher in the developing country. In effect, this is reverse “environmental dumping” by developed countries on the developing world. Boyce emphasizes the pollution impacts of the various activities, but I believe he downplays the land use and degradation aspects of the issues. For example, if Mexican peasant agriculture were protected, a growing Mexican population would create greater pressure for forest clearance to provide more land for low productivity peasant farms.

The final chapter of the book, which is supposed to be about “democratizing environmental ownership”, is a little disappointing as it seems rather short on specifics. Some case studies or other data would be useful here.

This is a well‐written and provocative book that should encourage further research on all these important issues.