Public opinion’s involvement and interests on environmental issues

The aim of this study is to extend previous findings by showing that involvement in environmental issues is shaped by personal attributes such as education and the subjective income but also by country characteristics. The dataset for this research comes from the 2005 World Value Survey and the 2008 Latin-barometer survey that allow us to consider a large and heterogeneous set of countries. The contributions of the paper are three-fold. Firstly, we provide clear evidence that the economic performance plays a relevant role, one direct consequence of this finding is that policies that change the macroeconomic arena would also change people’s attitudes. Secondly, we find that environmental quality could be considered as a luxury good by richer people because people’s attitudes depend not only on their income but also on the economic performance. Finally, richer people are aware of the availability of resources and of the quality of the institutions, hence their behavior changes depending on the characteristics of the country: in relatively poorer countries (where there are fewer resources), they tend to participate more than richer people that live in relatively richer countries.