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We weave together two strands of the scientific literature: we have been presented with the proposition that economic freedom and corruption are linked to economic prosperity and with the proposition that economic prosperity is related to environmental degradation. The question we explore empirically is whether economic freedom and corruption are linked, albeit perhaps indirectly through economic prosperity, to environmental degradation. Using data from 152 countries, we estimate models of factors that influence species imperilment and, controlling for cross-border effects, find evidence across several taxa groups of a statistically significant relationship between economic freedom and species imperilment. However, we find consistent evidence of a similar relationship between corruption and species imperilment for only one taxa group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Modeling the determinants of species'' ecological fragility using country-specific data may be complicated by the fact that factors that influence species imperilment may extend or operate beyond arbitrary political boundaries. Following McPherson and Nieswiadomy [McPherson, M.A. and Nieswiadomy, M.L., 2005. Environmental Kuznets curve: threatened species and spatial effects. Ecol. Econ. 55: 395–407.], we confirm the advisability of controlling for spatial autocorrelation in models focusing on imperilment of birds, mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and vascular plants. We also compare the performance of different definitions of the spatial dependency. Although our a priori expectation was that measures that more accurately reflect the degree of spatial interaction between countries, such as the percentage of shared border, would be superior to a measure of simple adjacency, in fact we find that the simple adjacency measure outperforms the other measures in most cases. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]