Abstract:
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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.
Keywords: ecological footprint; ecological inequality measurement, inequality decomposition. |