Attitudes of europeans towards Green products

Abstract

Currently, green production is becoming more important than ever before. Reasons are obvious without being specifically mentioned. Policy makers support various tools to encourage individuals and entities of using green products. Green public procurement (GPP) is a tool intended to support the achievement of environmental goals through the green purchasing. However, there is still scope for better use of GPP. What do policy makers need to know to propose an efficient intervention to stimulate the use of green products? An analysis of individual attitudes towards green products is particularly interesting in designing effective public interventions. The conclusions drawn from the literature review lead me to formulate the following research questions. What attitudes have Europeans towards green products? Which characteristics of individual influence his positive attitudes towards green products? I used the Open Data Barometer from 2012 and ordered logit models to identify statistically significant characteristics of individuals, which they use to determine their attitudes towards green products. Based on the results, I estimate who has a higher odds of having a positive attitude towards green products and therefore is predisposed to use them. Gender seems to be statistically significant predictor of more positive attitudes towards green products. Women have higher odds to have more positive attitudes comparing to men. Moreover, individual attitudes towards green products are determined by age, municipality size and working aspects. The results may be considered when making tailor-made interventions to support GPP and environmentally friendly production. This can be of interest to policy makers at regional or local level. © 2019 Institute of Economics, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. All Rights Reserved.