Country-level plastic bag legislation against plastic waste and select Human Development Indices

This dataset makes use of the UNEP (2018) report, Legal Limits on Single-Use Plastics and Microplastics: A Global Review of National Laws and Regulations, to create tabulated data categorising the type of legislation on single-use plastic bags enacted in 190 countries, updated to March 2019. Categories are Restrictions (ban), Levy/tax, New legislation proposed, Extended Producer Responsibility, Disposal Regulations, No national law found. For countries with bans on single-use plastic bags, full vs partial bans have been indicated. The dataset also draws on plastic waste estimations published in an article by Jambeck et al (2015), which has informed both UNEP 2018 reports on single-use plastics. Finally the dataset includes three indices of the Human Development Index 2019: Employment in Agriculture, Foreign Direct Investment, and Exports/Imports. Analyses of this dataset sought to understand the factors that influenced the type of single-use plastic bag policy a country implements. The supplementary dataset from Jambeck et al shows that middle-income countries (though the economy of each country has been updated in this dataset to reflect the 2019 status) have higher levels of plastic waste than their counterparts. However, ANOVA sets show that it is low-income countries that are most likely to have the most stringent legislations (restrictions and levy/tax), while middle-income countries are more likely to have obscure and largely ungoverned legislation (namely disposal regulation).本数据集依托联合国环境规划署（UNEP）2018年发布的报告《一次性塑料与微塑料的法律限制：全球国家法律法规综述》，构建制表数据集，对截至2019年3月的190个国家已出台的一次性塑料袋相关立法类型进行分类。分类类别涵盖：限制措施（禁令）、税费/征税政策、拟议新立法、生产者责任延伸（Extended Producer Responsibility）制度、处置监管法规、未发现国家层面相关法律法规。针对出台一次性塑料袋禁令的国家，本数据集还标注了全面禁令与部分禁令的区别。本数据集同时引用了Jambeck等人2015年发表的论文中的塑料垃圾估算数据，该数据亦为UNEP 2018年多项一次性塑料相关报告提供了研究支撑。此外，本数据集纳入了2019年人类发展指数（Human Development Index, HDI）的三项子指标：农业就业占比、外商直接投资、进出口贸易总额。本数据集的分析旨在探究影响一国选用一次性塑料袋政策类型的相关因素。Jambeck等人的补充数据集显示，中等收入国家（本数据集已更新各国经济数据以反映2019年的经济现状）的塑料垃圾产生水平高于其他收入层级的国家。但方差分析（Analysis of Variance, ANOVA）结果表明，低收入国家最有可能出台最严格的监管措施（限制措施与税费/征税政策），而中等收入国家则更倾向于制定模糊且基本未得到有效落实的监管法规（即处置监管类法规）。