An Empirical Analysis of Participation in International Environmental Agreements

This study investigates the determinants of participation in environmental agreements. To this end, we collated the largest ratiﬁcation dataset in the literature. Unlike previous data sets, ours includes both global and regional agreements and identiﬁes all countries eligible for membership in each agreement. This allows us to correct an identiﬁcation bias aﬀecting previous empirical estimates. We improve upon past unobserved heterogeneity by using a multilevel survival approach and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimator. Our ﬁndings show that countries’ participation choices are interrelated and primarily driven by the agreement’s characteristics. We also ﬁnd that the quality of institutions and environmental lobbying positively aﬀects participation in environmental agreements, while the eﬀect of industrial lobbying is statistically insigniﬁcant. This result is robust to changes in speciﬁcation and proxies used. Our results motivate several policy suggestions. We emphasise regional agreements’ capacity to deliver higher participation than global agreements and highlight the importance of securing the early participation of key players.