Environmental and pro-social norms: evidence on littering

Abstract

The paper investigates the relationship between pro-social norms and its implications for improved environmental outcomes. This is an area, which has been neglected in the environmental economics literature. We provide empirical evidence to demonstrate a robust link between perceived environmental cooperation (reduced public littering) and increased voluntary environmental morale. For this purpose we use European Values Survey (EVS) data for 30 European countries. We also demonstrate that Western European countries are more sensitive to perceived environmental cooperation than the public in Eastern Europe. Interestingly, the results also demonstrate that environmental morale is strongly correlated with several socio-economic and environmental variables. Several robustness tests are conducted to check the validity of
the results.