Green purchasing: the effect of parenthood and gender
- PDF / 666,399 Bytes
- 25 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 69 Downloads / 158 Views
Green purchasing: the effect of parenthood and gender Matteo Migheli1 Received: 21 May 2019 / Accepted: 28 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The extant literature has inquired the effect of several socio-economic individual characteristics on green purchasing, showing that education, social status and other individual characteristics may enhance virtuous behaviours, but has paid few attention to parenthood and to the presence of children. Theoretical models of microeconomic choices show that if the parents’ utility includes that of children, then their presence should affect parents’ green purchases. Indeed, parents should desire a sustainable world for their children to have access to enough resources. Using data from 61 countries, this paper inquires whether parenthood and the number of children affect people’s decisions about green consumption; in addition the presence of a gender effect (i.e. mothers being more prone to green choices than fathers) exists. The empirical evidence shows that having children decreases the probability of buying green products; an increasing number of children have the same effect. However, parenthood and number of children have opposite effects on fathers and on mothers. Policymakers and marketing divisions of firms may benefit from this empirical evidence. In addition, analyses are performed on homogeneous clusters of countries to account for possible differences due to different environmental engagement or level of economic development. The results show that, while the gender effect is persistent, that of parenting and the number of children is not statistically significant in affluent countries. This last result suggests that budget constraints are a major factor affecting green purchases. Keywords Green purchasing · Parenthood · Number of children · Gender
1 Introduction During the last decades of the twentieth century, people around the world have become more and more concerned about the environment, because of the continuous and accelerating depletion of natural resources (Fransson and Gärling 1999). Over time, consumers have changed their attitudes and started to prefer green products to their brown substitutes. Roberts (1996) highlights that US consumers have started this process of habit change already in the first part of the 1980s, when the US media began to sensitise the population about * Matteo Migheli [email protected] 1
Department of Economics and Statistics “Cognetti de Martiis”, University of Torino, Lungo Dora Siena, 100, 10153 Torino, Italy
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
M. Migheli
the environmental problems. According to Schlegelmilch et al. (1996) in the mid-1990s 82% of the UK citizens already rated environmental problems as urgent, showing a high degree of environmental concern, which translated in a demand for interventions aimed at preserving the environment. In addition, other studies (Suki 2016) highlight that environmental concern also increases the purchases of green goods. Several studies focus on green consumption1 and on the indivi
Data Loading...
