Intergovernmental Interaction in Compliance with an International Environmental Agreement

Published in Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, 2015

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the role of intergovernmental interaction in countries’ compliance with an international environmental agreement (IEA). We use two cross-sectional data sets that contain information on signatory countries’ compliance with an IEA on responsible fisheries. Our empirical strategy is based on estimating a spatial Durbin model using a maximum likelihood procedure. The results show that compliance effort by other participants has a systematic positive effect on a country’s own compliance. We argue that these findings provide empirical evidence that intergovernmental relations can improve the performance of voluntary IEAs where other formal sanction mechanisms are absent.