Is Social Capital Green? Cultural Features and Environmental Performance in the European Union

Abstract

This paper analyses the relationship between social capital and environmental performance in the European Union. In a first stage, environmental performance is measured by an index of eco-efficiency at the country level, computed using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) techniques and data for the year 2013. In a second stage, the influence of social capital and other relevant control variables on eco-efficiency is assessed by means of truncated regressions and bootstrapping, as proposed by Simar and Wilson (2007). For several model specifications, tests fail to reject the hypothesis of no effect of social capital on environmental performance, and the main driver of environmental performance is found to be the level of economic development, measured by GDP per capita. Furthermore, this result is robust to different definitions of social capital and sample periods.

A relational view of environmental performance: What role do environmental collaboration and cross-functional alignment play?

“…Our paper highlights social capital, relational capability, environmental collaboration, and cross-functional alignment as the relational underpinnings of environmental performance, and makes several theoretical contributions. First, our findings expand on current empirical research arguing that there is no direct relationship between social capital and environmental performance (Grafton & Knowles, 2004;Peiró-Palomino & Picazo-Tadeo, 2018). We shed further light on this relationship by investigating the mediating role of environmental collaboration.…”

“…First, we augment the growing literature that addresses the relationship between social capital and environmental performance. Recent research has argued that there is no direct relationship between social capital and environmental performance (Grafton & Knowles, 2004;Peiró-Palomino & Picazo-Tadeo, 2018). Our study offers a more comprehensive understanding of this relationship by examining the mediating role of environmental collaboration.…”

The European Union Green Deal: Clean Energy Wellbeing Opportunities and the Risk of the Jevons Paradox

“…In order to achieve this target, the EU has performed an important package of measures, called the European Green Deal. The main driver of ecoefficiency seems to be economic development, as measured by GDP per capita, so growth and economics seem to be the clue to energy performance [48].…”

Evaluation of Atmospheric Environmental Efficiency and Spatiotemporal Differences in the Yangtze River Delta Region of China

“…From the perspective of evaluation methods, there are two main methods for efficiency measurement, which are the stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) and the data envelopment analysis (DEA) [5,6]. When measuring efficiency, SFA takes into account the influence of the external environment and assumes the existence of a random error term for each production unit.…”