Economics, Climate change

Economic liberalisation is good for the environment

There is a large literature showing that liberalizations boost economic growth. Do these gains come with environmental costs? In this paper, we use 49 cases of large-scale liberalization – as proxied by large discrete jumps on the Economic Freedom of the World Index – to study the effects of liberalizations on greenhouse gas emissions (total, per capita and per dollar of GDP) and deaths from outdoor air pollution. Using…