The carbon intensity of well-being (CIWB) (a ratio measuring the amount of CO₂ emitted per unit of life expectancy at birth) is an increasingly popular way to measure the ecological efficiency of nations. Although research demonstrates that economic development typically reduces this efficiency, little research has explored the extent to which social equality improves it. This study uses panel data for 70 nations between 1995 and 2013 to assess how various aspects of gender equality affect the ecological efficiency of nations. We estimate a series of Prais-Winsten regression models with panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) to assess how increases in the percentage of women in parliament, expected years of education for women, and the percentage of women in the labor force independently affect CIWB. Our findings indicate that across all nations, increases in the percentage of women in parliament and expected years of schooling reduce CIWB; however, increases in the percentage of women in the labor force increase CIWB. Our results further show that the relationship between different dimensions of gender equality and CIWB differs between more developed and less developed nations. Finally, we find that increases in the number of women in parliament and women’s education attenuate the relationship between women’s labor force participation and CIWB. We discuss the variation in our results by reviewing relevant eco-gender literatures and feminist economics.

Sustainability scholars frame urbanization as a multidimensional concept with divergent environmental impacts. Through synthesizing recent quantitative studies of urbanization in criminology, we evaluated this multidimensional framework in a longitudinal, cross-national analysis of homicide rates for 217 countries between 2000 and 2015. For the analysis, we also highlighted the issue of missing data, a common concern for cross-national scholars in a variety of disciplines. While controlling for other relevant factors, we compared results from panel models that use the common technique of listwise deletion (n = 113) and from structural equation models (SEM) that handle missing values with full information maximum likelihood (n = 216). While the estimates for the control variables are non-significant in the SEM approach, the findings for the urbanization variables were robust and multidimensional. In particular, while the proportion of the population that is urban is positively related to homicide, the proportion of the population living in large cities of at least one million inhabitants is significantly and negatively related to homicide in all models. Given our focus on urbanization, we outline our contribution not only in the context of criminology but also the cross-national sustainability literature, which often uses similar variables with missing values.