The asymmetric effect of environmental policy stringency on CO2 emissions in OECD countries

This paper uses a quantile fixed-effect panel data approach to investigate how environmental policy stringency affects CO2 emissions in a set of 32 OECD countries from 1990 to 2015. This approach allows us to identify the asymmetric impact of policy stringency on emissions, considering the emission level recorded in each analysed country. More precisely, we posit that the effectiveness of environmental regulations and policies is influenced by the air pollution level. Our results show that an increase in policy stringency has a negative impact on emissions. As a new contribution, we show that environmental stringency has a more powerful impact in the countries with lower level of carbon emissions. This result is also recorded for the subset of EU member countries of the OECD. Moreover, we show that policy stringency measures only become effective after the implementation of the Kyoto agreement. Finally, the policy stringency effect is stronger for EU countries at high risk of missing the 20-20-20 target in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.