The Causal Impact of Colonial Legacies on Environmental Performance Dataset

This dataset, accompanying “The Causal Impact of Colonial Legacies on Environmental Performance” by Hiroaki Iwama (Kyoto University), tests the hypothesis that countries with lower settler mortality during colonization developed stronger institutions, which in turn led to higher contemporary environmental performance. It combines cross-country data for 63 nations, including the 2024 Environmental Performance Index (EPI), institutional quality indicators from the International Country Risk Guide (1984–2024), historical settler mortality rates (Acemoglu et al., 2001), and controls such as GDP, population, and trade openness. Using a two-stage least squares estimation, the study finds that lower settler mortality predicts stronger institutions, which causally improve environmental outcomes, particularly in environmental health and climate change mitigation. The dataset enables replication and further research on how historical institutions continue to shape modern environmental governance.