Environmentalism among Poor and Rich Countries: Using Natural Language Processing to Handle Perfunctory Support and Rising Powers

Abstract

In international politics, is environmental protection largely a "rich-country" priority? We perceive four reasons why, although individual exceptions are possible, the answer would be yes: as a country meets more of its basic economic needs, it can better take on environmental policy's long-term thinking, policy expenses, collective action problems, and quality-of-life issues. To cut through lip service paid by governments that are not serious about environmental protection, and the fact that the BASIC countries occupy a gray area between rich and poor, we employ computer-assisted textual analyses on all 3,774 paragraphs of statements made by national governments between 1995-2012 in the Committee on Trade and Environment within the World Trade Organization. Controlling for other factors, we find a general pattern of environmental discussions increasing as development level increases. This contributes substantively and methodologically to the literatures on the environment/development nexus and rising powers.