Environmentalism among poor and rich countries: using natural language processing to handle perfunctory support and rising powers

In international politics, is environmental protection largely a “rich-country” priority? We perceive four reasons why, although individual exceptions are possible, the answer would be yes: as a country meets more of its basic economic needs, it can better take on environmental policy’s long-term thinking, policy expenses, collective action problems, and quality-of-life issues. To cut through lip service paid by governments that are not serious about environmental protection, and the fact that the “BASIC” countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) occupy a gray area between rich and poor, we employ computer-assisted textual analyses on all 3,774 paragraphs of statements made by national governments between 1995–2012 in the Committee on Trade and Environment (CTE) within the World Trade Organization (WTO). Controlling for other factors, we find a general pattern of environmental discussions increasing as development level increases. This contributes substantively and methodologically to the literatures on the environment/development nexus and rising powers.