Going global, locally? Decentralized environmental expenditure and air quality
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3326/pse.46.4.3Keywords:
decentralization, air quality, local governance, environmental policy, urban agendaAbstract
Achieving more liveable cities is one of the main goals set by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). According to a recent survey, most subnational governments participate in SDG implementation, especially to achieve environmental goals. Moreover, the public health concerns of COVID 19 have helped to motivate even more cities to improve local air quality. However, despite the importance of intergovernmental cooperation for the success of the SDGs, there is still limited progress at the regional and local levels, due to limited institutional capacity and doubts about electoral consequences of unevenly distributed costs. We use panel data for 2010-2019, covering 217 OECD metropolitan areas, together with consolidated environmental expenditure, and find that subnational public spending on environmental protection is more strongly associated with better municipal air quality than environmental expenditure by general governments. Moreover, environmental spending shows a relationship with reduced air pollution exposure through the mechanism of higher institutional quality.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Sean Dougherty, Andoni Montes Nebreda
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Copyright Notice
Public Sector Economics (PSE) is a an Open Access Journal licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, which permits use and redistribution (commercial and non-commercial), as long as the licensed work is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to PSE as original publisher.
Authors retain the copyright on the papers published in PSE but grant the right of first publication to the journal.
Papers published in PSE can be re-published only exceptionally and in unaltered form, e.g., as a chapter in a volume of an author’s collected papers, or as an unabridged translation for educational purposes. The author(s) must obtain written permission of the publisher and clearly indicate in a first page footnote the reference to the original publication in PSE.
Individual users may access, download, copy and display the papers published in PSE, provided that the authors’ intellectual and moral rights, reputation and integrity are not compromised. It is the obligation of the user to ensure that any reuse complies with the copyright policies of the owners.
If the content of papers published in the PSE is copied, downloaded or otherwise reused for non-commercial research and educational purposes, a link to the appropriate bibliographic citation (authors, title of the paper, PSE volume, year and page numbers) should be provided. Copyright notices and disclaimers must not be deleted.