Environmental Sustainability
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Abstract
This article investigates the driving forces of the ecological footprint (EF) and its six subcomponents to examine similarities in sources using a cross-national data set of more than 100 countries. Expectations from environmental impact, world-systems, and world-polity perspectives are incorporated in a model examining the institutional-level attributes driving national-level imprints on the biophysical environment. Results suggest that the structural factors driving ecological footprints differ across the EF's subcomponents and are similar for only one of its pieces, carbon uptake. Specifying alternative sets of predictors from previous research for three EF subcomponents offers support for a model specifying a set of simultaneous equations or seemingly unrelated regression models. These underlying processes, though driven by different structural influences, are linked with one another for the cross-national sample of countries examined here.