Abstract
Despite growing concern about the low-carbon economic development, little is known about the role of political institutions, democracy, or the absence thereof, in controlling carbon intensity (carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP). This paper estimates the causal effects of democratic transition in Indonesia on its national carbon emission intensity. The synthetic control method is adopted to handle both time-invariant and time-variant confounding heterogeneity. Results show that Indonesia’s democratic transition increases on average 0.24 kg carbon dioxide emissions per constant 2005 US dollar in the post-transition period (1999–2010), a rise of approximately 25.34%. The placebo tests indicate this causal effect is significant and the leave-one-out sensitivity check also demonstrates its robustness. The evidence of Indonesia suggests that democratic transition may serve to intensify, rather than mitigate, the emissions of carbon dioxide. Therefore, policymakers should pay more attentions to the contextual fit of democratic transition.
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Notes
This report can be downloaded from the official website of IPCC. See https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg3/ipcc_wg3_ar5_summary-for-policymakers.pdf.
It needs to be mentioned that causal inference research is not to prove causation, but to identify the impact of exposure to a particular treatment or program. For example, Rothman and Greenland (2005) discuss the causality and causal inference in epidemiology and argue that “philosophers agree that causal propositions cannot be proved, and find flaws or practical limitations in all philosophies of causal inference. Hence, the role of logic, belief, and observation in evaluating causal propositions is not settled. Causal inference in epidemiology is better viewed as an exercise in measurement of an effect rather than as a criterion-guided process for deciding whether an effect is present or not.”
The methodology report and dataset can be downloaded from the official website of Freedom House. https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/freedom-world-2017
This research implements SCM with the R package “MSCMT” (Becker and Klößner 2018).
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Acknowledgements
The author thanks Richard P. Balme and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments.
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This work was supported by China Scholarship Council (CSC) [NO.201708330099].
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Responsible editor: Philippe Garrigues
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Mao, Y. Does democratic transition reduce carbon intensity? Evidence from Indonesia using the synthetic control method. Environ Sci Pollut Res 25, 19908–19917 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-018-2165-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-018-2165-1