IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/gunwpe/0786.html

The Climate Decade: Changing Attitudes on Three Continents

Author

Listed:
  • Carlsson, Fredrik

    (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

  • Kataria, Mitesh

    (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

  • Krupnick, Alan

    (Resources for the Future,)

  • Elina, Lampi

    (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

  • Åsa, Löfgren

    (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

  • Qin, Ping

    (School of Applied Economics, Renmin University of China)

  • Thomas, Sterner

    (Department of Economics, School of Business, Economics and Law, Göteborg University)

  • Yang, Xiaojun

    (School of Public Policy and Administration, Xi'an Jiaotong University)

Abstract

Using identical surveys a decade apart, we examine how attitudes and willingness to pay (WTP) for climate policies have changed in the United States, China, and Sweden. All three countries exhibit an increased willingness to pay for climate mitigation. Ten years ago, Sweden had a larger fraction of believers in anthropogenic climate change and a higher WTP for mitigation, but today the national averages are more similar. Although we find convergence in public support for climate policy across countries, there is considerable divergence in both WTP and climate attitudes within countries. Political polarization explains part of this divergence.

Suggested Citation

  • Carlsson, Fredrik & Kataria, Mitesh & Krupnick, Alan & Elina, Lampi & Åsa, Löfgren & Qin, Ping & Thomas, Sterner & Yang, Xiaojun, 2020. "The Climate Decade: Changing Attitudes on Three Continents," Working Papers in Economics 786, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics, revised 07 Jan 2021.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0786
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/64514
    File Function: Full text
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Berazneva, Julia & Graeber, Daniel & McCauley, Michelle & Zinn, Sabine & Matthews, Peter Hans, 2024. "Moral bandwidth and environmental concerns during a public health crisis: Evidence from Germany," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 228(C).
    2. Guglielmo Zappalà, 2023. "Drought Exposure and Accuracy: Motivated Reasoning in Climate Change Beliefs," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 85(3), pages 649-672, August.
    3. Jin, Peizhen & Mangla, Sachin Kumar & Song, Malin, 2022. "The power of innovation diffusion: How patent transfer affects urban innovation quality," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 145(C), pages 414-425.
    4. Auriane Meilland & Yann Kervinio & Aurélie Méjean, 2024. "International Climate Justice: What the People Think," Post-Print hal-04825108, HAL.
    5. Carlsson, Fredrik & Kataria, Mitesh & Lampi, Elina, 2025. "The impact of politicized and costly climate policies on trust in scientific information and policy support," Working Papers in Economics 856, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    6. Agneman, Gustav & Henriks, Sofia & Bäck, Hanna & Renström, Emma, 2024. "On the nexus between material and ideological determinants of climate policy support," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 219(C).
    7. Guglielmo Zappalà, 2022. "Drought exposure and accuracy: Motivated reasoning in climate change beliefs," Working Papers 2022.02, FAERE - French Association of Environmental and Resource Economists.
    8. Gualtieri, Giovanni & Nicolini, Marcella & Sabatini, Fabio & Ventura, Marco, 2025. "Shaken Politics: The Electoral Outcomes of Disasters and Social Capital," IZA Discussion Papers 17758, Institute of Labor Economics (IZA).
    9. Auriane Meilland & Yann Kervinio & Aurélie Méjean, 2025. "International Climate Justice: What the People Think," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 88(1), pages 225-247, January.
    10. Fredrik Carlsson & Mitesh Kataria & Elina Lampi & Åsa Löfgren & Thomas Sterner, 2025. "The Importance of EU Coordination: Citizen Preferences for Climate Leadership and the Role of Conditional Cooperation," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 88(5), pages 1339-1373, May.
    11. Loureiro, Maria L. & Alló, Maria, 2024. "Feeling the heat? Analyzing climate change sentiment in Spain using Twitter data," Resource and Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(C).
    12. Matthew Ashenfarb & Matthew J. Kotchen, 2025. "A Method for Deriving Stated Preference Estimates of the Average Social Cost of Carbon," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 88(8), pages 2059-2083, August.
    13. O'Dell, Dallas & Contu, Davide & Shreedhar, Ganga, 2025. "Public support for degrowth policies and sufficiency behaviours in the United States: A discrete choice experiment," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 228(C).
    14. Yan, Jin & Liu, Lancui & Gao, Xue & Yan, Haoben & Kuang, Shiyi, 2025. "Talk or walk? Evidence from 59 countries on the impact of the net-zero target on low-carbon technology innovation," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 147(C).
    15. O'Dell, Dallas & Contu, Davide & Shreedhar, Ganga, 2025. "Public support for degrowth policies and sufficiency behaviours in the United States: a discrete choice experiment," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 126084, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • Q51 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Valuation of Environmental Effects
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:hhs:gunwpe:0786. 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: Jessica Oscarsson (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/naiguse.html .

    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.