IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/wpaper/hal-05021482.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Social Unrest and Environmental Performance

Author

Listed:
  • Mahdi Fawaz

    (Université Sorbonne Paris Nord)

  • Donatella Gatti

    (CEPN - Centre d'Economie de l'Université Paris Nord - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Université Sorbonne Paris Nord, Université Sorbonne Paris Nord)

Abstract

There is a growing consensus that policies such as carbon taxes are needed to improve environmental performance. We propose a theoretical framework and a model to examine how environmental concerns determine political support for carbon taxation and the incentives for the poor to revolt, replace the incumbent government, and achieve a fairer distribution of income. Our main result is that the incentive to revolt is an inverted U-shaped function of environmental performance. On the empirical side, we construct a normalized Social Unrest Index (SUI) based on riots and battles data from the ACLED database. Then, we analyze the determinants of SUI in a panel of 211 countries between 1997 and 2022 including a quadratic term of the EPI index (Yale University). We find an inverted U-shaped relationship that is robust in all the specifications tested. In autocratic regimes, as EPI rises from 30% to 40%, SUI predicted average almost doubles from 12.8% to 20.4%, while it falls at higher EPI levels. Our results have important policy implications.

Suggested Citation

  • Mahdi Fawaz & Donatella Gatti, 2025. "Social Unrest and Environmental Performance," Working Papers hal-05021482, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-05021482
    DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5200178
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-05021482. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.