How does globalization affect ecological pressures? A robust empirical analysis using the Ecological Footprint

While the relationship between environmental pressures and globalization is often claimed to be unambiguously positive, there is a substantial gap in the literature regarding systematic evidence. We fill this gap by empirically disentangling the nexus between globalization and environmental degradation while at the same time taking the multidimensionality of the concepts serious. The Ecological Footprint (EF) provides a holistic approach to environmental degradation. We generate a data set covering 146 countries over the 1981-2009 period and use an Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA) to identify a robust set of controls testing different claims of the literature. Subsequently, we test our hypothesis regarding globalization controlling for this vector of controls. Our findings suggest that the simple positive correlation has to be interpreted with care, since the multivariate analysis reveals a more detailed picture of the complex relationship.