| Expenditure on environmental protection activities is largely decided by environmental policies, implying that environmental protection expenditure reflects a country's environmental policy capacity. This study investigates how the veto players in the political system influence countries' environmental protection policies. Using data collected by the European Commission and the World Bank, the study conducts two empirical tests, one is how veto players impact countries' spending on environmental protection activities and the other is how veto players impact countries' capacity to change environmental protection policies, and it finds out that political systems with more veto players can promote environmental protection policy development more effectively, but the impacts are also influenced by how divergent are those political players. Another finding of this study is that environmental protection policies affects non-industry sectors (e.g. government agencies and third party waste treatment) more than it does to industry sectors (e.g. investment in equipment and plant for pollution control). |
