May 1, 2009
Are free markets greener?  On the one hand, government regulation can protect the environment from negative externalities (e.g. pollution, destruction of crucial habitats, etc).  On the other hand, governments tend to be terribly inefficient.  So, where there is more control of the economy, there is more inefficiency and waste, which can easily lead to greater environmental degradation  Curious about this, I took the Yale Environmental Performance Index and plotted it against the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom. The result is this plot of economic freedom vs environmental performance for 147 countries. I did not calculate any hard correlation coefficients for these data, but they do seem to be positively correlated.

Are free markets greener?  On the one hand, government regulation can protect the environment from negative externalities (e.g. pollution, destruction of crucial habitats, etc).  On the other hand, governments tend to be terribly inefficient.  So, where there is more control of the economy, there is more inefficiency and waste, which can easily lead to greater environmental degradation 

Curious about this, I took the Yale Environmental Performance Index and plotted it against the Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom. The result is this plot of economic freedom vs environmental performance for 147 countries.

I did not calculate any hard correlation coefficients for these data, but they do seem to be positively correlated.

12:20am  |   URL: http://tmblr.co/Zjzkay65pLR