Economic growth and the environment: The economic, political, and social determinants of a complex relationship

This dissertation assesses the impact of the assurance of property rights on the potential for environmental stewardship at any level of development. It extends previous research on the relationship between economic growth and environmental quality (Grossman and Krueger 1995, 1994, 1993, 1991; Janicke, Binder, Bratzel, Carius, Joergens, Kern, and Monch 1995; Shafik and Bandyopadhyay 1992), which found a strong relationship between per capita income levels and environmental quality. This research left a crucial questions unanswered: how can governments improve environmental quality at any given level of development? This is the question which this dissertation attempts to answer.;On the empirical side, the dissertation tests the hypothesis that the assurance of property rights positively influences environmental stewardship at any level of development for twelve indicators of environmental quality. The assurance of property rights is approximated by a monetary measure, gauging the trust of a country's population in enforcement-intensive contracts and financial institutions. The results show that for the majority of environmental indicators tested the assurance of property rights is indeed positively associated with environmental quality, and in some cases is even more significant than per capita income levels.;At the same time, the dissertation acknowledges that the assurance of property rights is not a sufficient condition for the achievement of environmentally-desirable outcomes and discusses contextual determinants of a ranking of the environmental desirability of property regimes. Furthermore, the dissertation discusses political, social, and cultural factors frequently identified as determinants of environmental policy and/or quality (government regimes, centralization, policy effort, post-materialism, and income distributions), and provides results of preliminary empirical assessments of their significance.;On the theoretical side, the dissertation highlights that the assurance of property rights reduces transaction costs and increases the expected benefits from natural resources. By improving the assurance of property rights, therefore, governments can provide incentives for a better delineation of property rights and a subsequent reduction in the amount of environmentally vulnerable open-access resources. In addition, the dissertation emphasizes that improvements in the assurance of property rights benefit the potential for environmental stewardship for natural resources under any property regime (private property, common property, state-ownership, and open-access).