Does Education Affect Environmental Crime? A Dynamic Panel Data Approach at Provincial Level in Italy

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10575677211020812
• Published date: 01 June 2023
• Date: 01 June 2023
• Subject Matter: Original Articles

Original Article

Does Education Affect

Environmental Crime?

A Dynamic Panel Data Approach

at Provincial Level in Italy

Angelo Castaldo

1

, Anna Rita Germani

1

,

and Antonio Pergolizzi

2

Abstract

This article investigates the role of education on environmental crime in Italy using a panel of 110

Italian provinces over the period 2010–2015. We employ a system-GMM (Generalized Method of

Moments) dynamic panel data approach to tackle the endogeneity that might arise in the estimations

from the environmental crime dynamic path and to consider time-invariant effects on provinces.

Our empirical results, even after controlling for socioeconomic and judicial efficiency characteristics,

support the existence of a U-inverted relationship between education and environmental crime,

which depicts an unconventional finding: At the margin, a higher level of education endowment

offsets the propensity to commit environmental crimes, which are confirmed to be white-collar type

of crimes. The results are robust to model specifications and endogeneity. Furthermore, to check

the robustness of nonmonotonicity in the relationship between environmental crime and education

and to control for unobserved provincial heterogeneity, we also exploit a semiparametric fixed

effects model. There is wide room for efficiency gains that could arise from policy interventions

aiming to put environmental crimes into perspective.

Keywords

environmental crime, education, system-GMM, semiparametric fixed effects model, Italy

The problems and the consequences caused by environmental crimes in contemporary societies

and suggested approaches of intervention are gaining increasing relevance worldwide. However,

despite the growing awareness of the phenomenon at community, political, and institutional levels,

very little is known, from an empirical point of view, about the determinants and the nature of

environmental crimes. In Italy, every year environmental criminals produce billion-dollar business

1

Departmentof Juridical and Economic Studies (DSGE), SapienzaUniversity of Rome, Italy

2

REF Ricerche, Milan, Italy

Corresponding Author:

Angelo Castaldo, Department of Juridical and Economic Studies (DSGE), Sapienza University of Rome, p.le Aldo Moro, 5,

Rome 00185, Italy.

Email: angelo.castaldo@uniroma1.it

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to the detriment of the well-being of the territory and of its people. Only in 2018, 1.2 million tons of

special hazardous waste were illegally trafficked, over 17,000 violations in the construction sector

have been perpetrated, and its cultural heritage and the protected flora and fauna have been plun-

dered (Legambiente, 2019). These numbers are emblematic in that they bear witness to the strength

and the growth of the volume of illegal environmental markets that range from the illegal traffic of

waste to the illegal trade of wildlife and cultural heritage, from counterfeiting in the agri-food sector

to forest fires and illegal construction.

In Italy, in addition to widespread and high levels of corruption, other problems are often

associated with environmental crime, such as (1) nonuniform application of administrative controls

and enforcement actions, especially at local level (i.e., monitoring, inspections, authorizations, etc.),

(2) lack of coordination among the several authorities involved in the enforcement of environmental

laws and regulations that often work independently, (3) legal uncertainty due to perennial changes in

legislation that do not make clear the distinction between legal and illegal actions (i.e., end of waste

policy) together with incoherent and sometimes “criminogenic” features of the laws (meaning by

this that norms or regulations might contain elements that can be a potential source of inspiration and

justification in committing illegal actions), (4) regional variations in the amount of plant equipment

(i.e., for waste recycling and recovery treatments), (5) presence of eco-criminal structures (i.e.,

mafia-like organizations) that offer widespread safe-havens to eco-criminals, and (6) weak social

awareness of environmental crime and its victims. In addition to these aspects, in Italy, there has

been not only a lack of economic resources devoted to environmental crime prevention and control

but also a problem of collusion between political parties and industrial lobbies that has affected, for

several years, the criminal environmental legislation and its effective enforcement. All these cir-

cumstances have created the prevalence of a system that, over time, has allowed easy private profits

generating huge environmental and social costs (D’Alisa et al., 2017).

Furthermore, the massive production of laws and regulatory modifications have created a nor-

mative chaos: The main normative instruments in the protection of the environment, in fact, are still

scattered in several different laws, such as Legislative Decree 152/2006 (which regulates the waste

management process, soil and the fight against desertification, water pollution and the management

of water resources, and air emissions), Legislative Decree 380/2001 (which regulates the building

sector), Legislative Decree 42/2004 (the so-called Cultural Heritage Code), and the Penal Code.

Only recently, the Law 68/2015 has introduced a new Chapter (VI bis) to the Italian Penal Code

devoting it to crimes against the environment and defining some new types of crimes: intentional

crimes, environmental pollution and fatal injuries, traffic and abandonment of high radioactivity

material, and environmental disaster. Due to this recent law reform directed at the strengthening of

environmental criminal enforcement, we believe that our findings should assist policymakers in

identifying the drivers of environmental crimes.

Environmental crime often goes hand in hand with white-collar types of crimes throughout the

criminal chain (Nelleman et al., 2016). Unlike with other forms of more naive criminal activities,

eco-criminals have to know the legal market and its operational dynamics, the complex structure of

regulatory frameworks, and the strengths and weaknesses of the monitoring and enforcement sys-

tem. In addition, environmental crime is usually attached to multiple and complex criminal beha-

viors that require connections with other types of conduct, such as corruption, fraud, and money

laundering activities (Pergolizzi, 2019). This complexity supports the basic idea that these are forms

of crime that need highly skilled and sophisticated professional abilities. In contrast with the public’s

simplistic opinions and prevailing views that organized crime is responsible for most environmental

crime in Italy, more recently, Italian authorities (i.e., National Anti-Mafia Directorate) have empha-

sized that corporations with no mafia connections very often commit environmental crimes (de

Falco, 2014; Roberti, 2014), advocating a widening in their classification toward a broader corporate

crime definition rather than exclusively mafia-type of crimes. Despite the increasing attention at the

130 International Criminal Justice Review 33(2)