Shifting environmental pollution abroad contributes to lower emissions in democracies | PLOS Climate
Many studies suggest that democracies have, on average, a better environmental protection record than authoritarian states. But this debate is far from resolved. Hence, we take a closer look at an overlooked factor that may shed new light on the ambiguous claims and findings of the democracy-environment nexus: pollution offshoring. We hypothesize that democracies can improve their record and become “greener” not only through genuinely domestic environmental protection, but also through outsourcing environmental impacts of their consumption to other countries. Analyzing data on greenhouse gas emissions, pollution offshoring, and democracy for more than 160 countries since the 1990s, we report evidence that the offshoring of environmental pollution contributes to the superior environmental record of democracies. The main policy implication is that democracies, per se, may not have a better environmental record than autocracies when considering global environmental impacts. This implies that democratic countries, in particular, should re-orient their environmental protection efforts from merely domestic to global environmental consequences of local economic activity.
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TL;DR: Democracies often look “greener” than autocracies, but Bernauer et al. (2025) argue that a big part of this is pollution offshoring—basically buying dirtier goods from abroad and counting only domestic emissions. They crunch data on 160+ countries (1990–2015), merging V-Dem scores with both domestic CO₂-equivalent emissions and outsourced greenhouse-gas footprints.
The kicker: Their analysis shows that higher democracy levels correlate with more pollution offshoring, which in turn helps drive down in-country emissions. In other words, democracies may not actually be cleaner globally—just clever at exporting their carbon. The authors urge democratic governments to shift focus from purely local regulation to accounting for the full global impact of their consumption.
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