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An important literature examines the determinants of environmental concern within and across countries. The debate on whether affluence explains variations in environmental concern remains unsettled. An increasing number of studies acknowledge the importance of individual level characteristics as predictors of environmental concern. In this paper, we examine the relationship between perceived socioeconomic status and environmental concern among residents of less developed and developed countries. Our results show that in both less developed and developed countries, individual perceptions about their socioeconomic status are positively correlated with environmental concern. Specifically, aside from choosing environmental protection over economic growth and job creation, we find that people who perceive themselves as belonging to the working class, lower middle, upper middle and upper class are significantly more willing to make income sacrifices to prevent environmental pollution than those who believe they are in the lower class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of cross-national variations in industrial conflict, especially in strike activity, has challenged researchers for many decades. It has also bedevilled public policy makers for whom the question is: will governmental regulation aimed at resolving industrial disputes have the desired effect of reducing conflict? Using a huge sample including all major industrialized countries, industrial relations scholars since the end of the war have constructed several intriguing models in an attempt to tackle the problem. These are briefly reviewed in this paper to show that the very breadth of their scope, while answering some important questions, raises other difficult ones. It would perhaps be more revealing to compare the experience of a pair of countries in depth. But choosing the pair presents some difficulties. On the one hand, countries with very different sets of industrial relations institutions, politics, industrial structures, and patterns of trade union organization, such as Sweden and the United States, would perhaps present too broad a contrast to capture more than the most obvious, and hence trite, differences. On the other hand, countries like Canada and the U.S. may be too similar, especially in the general attitude to regulation of industrial conflict.