Consumption and Environmental Degradation: A Cross-National Analysis of the Ecological Footprint

Abstract

Consumption and concomitant environmental degradation are among the most pressing global issues confronting us today. This research argues that these problems are embedded within the context of hierarchical inter-state relationships and intra-national characteristics in the modern world-system. Using cross-national comparisons among 208 countries, I construct a recursive indirect effects model to estimate the direct, indirect, and total effects of world-system position, domestic inequality, urbanization, and literacy rates on a comprehensive indicator of per capita consumption of natural resources: the ecological footprint. I find that world-system position has the strongest positive total effect on per capita consumption, followed by urbanization and literacy rates. Domestic inequality, by contrast, has a strong negative total effect on per capita consumption. In a second analysis, I examine the extent to which cross-national variation of consumption levels occurs within different zones of the world-system. I find and discuss two outliers in the core and one in the periphery, and a relatively high level of variation in the semiperiphery.