Gender Equality and Environmental Quality Nexus: the Case of OECD Countries

This study investigates the interaction between two opposite indicators of gender equality-women's political empowerment index and neopatrimonial rule index-and environmental quality to elucidate further the mechanism behind the divergence between the theoretical and empirical literature on democratic rights and environmental quality nexus. By analyzing OECD country data between 1980 and 2018 and utilizing the augmented mean group (AMG) estimator, it is shown that higher levels of women's participation in decision-making processes alleviate the environmental deterioration via the direct effects. With further exploration of data, the study also exposes that one of the critical reasons creating the divergence between the theoretical and empirical literature is the indirect effects via welfare channel becoming more dominant as society becomes less gender-equal. In other words, the deterioration in environmental quality remains relatively low due to destitution in less gender-equal countries.