Macro-economic and development indexes and ISO14001 certificates: a cross national analysis

Environmental Management Systems (EMSs) implemented according to the ISO14001 standard have been examined by many authors, especially focussing on its impact at the firm level. However only a few papers have investigated the impact of ISO14001 from a country perspective. This paper aims to contribute to bridging this gap. The aim is to study the relation between ISO14001 growth and the trend in selected macro-economic and development indexes. By applying the Growth Mixture Model to a panel of 73 countries for the period 1999-2012, we assess the following hypotheses: (a) the increase in numbers of ISO14001 certifications corresponds to an increase in economic indexes; (b) the increase in ISO14001 corresponds to an increase in development indexes; (c) the trends of ISO14001 adoption and macro-economic indexes confirm the relationship described by the Environmental Kuznets Curve. The results confirm a positive relation among the trends of some variables such as ISO14001 and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), ISO14001 and industry value added while no significant results were found when observing the relation between ISO14001 and the selected development indexes. In addition, using the industry added value as the variable to measure economic development, our results support the theory of the Environmental Kuznets Curve. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.