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Ecological Footprint Inequality: A methodological review and some results

Author

Listed:
  • Jordi Teixidó-Figueras

    (Departament d’Economia Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Av. de la Universitat, 1, 43204. Reus, Spain, CREIP and XREAP)

  • Juan Antonio Duro

    (Departament d’Economia Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Av. de la Universitat, 1, 43204. Reus, Spain, CREIP and XREAP)

Abstract
Scarcities of environmental services are no longer merely a remote hypothesis. Consequently, analysis of their inequalities between nations becomes of paramount importance for the achievement of sustainability in terms either of international policy, or of Universalist ethical principles of equity. This paper aims, on the one hand, at revising methodological aspects of the inequality measurement of certain environmental data and, on the other, at extending the scarce empirical evidence relating to the international distribution of Ecological Footprint (EF), by using a longer EF time series. Most of the techniques currently important in the literature are revised and then tested on EF data with interesting results. We look in depth at Lorenz dominance analyses and consider the underlying properties of different inequality indices. Those indices which fit best with environmental inequality measurements are CV2 and GE(2) because of their neutrality property, however a trade-off may occur when subgroup decompositions are performed. A weighting factor decomposition method is proposed in order to isolate weighting factor changes in inequality growth rates. Finally, the only non-ambiguous way of decomposing inequality by source is the natural decomposition of CV2, which additionally allows the interpretation of marginal term contributions. Empirically, this paper contributes to the environmental inequality measurement of EF: this inequality has been quite stable and its change over time is due to per capita vector changes rather than population changes. Almost the entirety of the EF inequality is explainable by differences in the means between the countries of the World Bank group. This finding suggests that international environmental agreements should be attempted on a regional basis in an attempt to achieve greater consensus between the parties involved. Additionally, source decomposition warns of the dangers of confining CO2 emissions reduction to crop-based energies because of the implications for basic needs satisfaction.

Suggested Citation

  • Jordi Teixidó-Figueras & Juan Antonio Duro, 2012. "Ecological Footprint Inequality: A methodological review and some results," Working Papers XREAP2012-15, Xarxa de Referència en Economia Aplicada (XREAP), revised Sep 2012.
    • Handle: RePEc:xrp:wpaper:xreap2012-15
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    1. Duro, Juan Antonio & Teixidó-Figueras, Jordi, 2013. "Ecological footprint inequality across countries: The role of environment intensity, income and interaction effects," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 34-41.
    2. Teixidó-Figueras, Jordi & Duro, Juan Antonio, 2015. "The building blocks of International Ecological Footprint inequality: A Regression-Based Decomposition," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 118(C), pages 30-39.

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