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In this project, we address the question of how consumers in wealthier countries weigh the environmental impacts of products in relation to the place of production and how much they are willing to pay for environmental quality at home and abroad. For this purpose, we will study three high-income nations: Germany, Japan, and the United States of America.

Vastly increased international trade over the past few decades has resulted in an ever larger geographical spread in the environmental impacts of local consumption. Particularly in the case of high-income countries, a large share of their total environmental footprint of local consumption now materializes in places far beyond the respective national border. On the presumption that democratic policy-makers should, and often do, act in line with prevailing public opinion we examine whether currently weak policies addressing consumption-based environmental impacts abroad may reflect a knowledge gap amongst citizens, and how closing this knowledge gap would affect policy preferences concerning the greening of international supply chains. We do so based on an experiment, embedded in a large representative survey (N=8’000) in Switzerland, a high-income country with a very large extraterritorial environmental footprint. The main finding is that there is a major knowledge gap amongst the mass public in this area, and that this gap can be closed. However, closing the knowledge gap does not lead to a significant change in policy preferences in favor of reducing the global environmental footprint of local consumption. This points to major policy challenges in trying to mitigate problems of environmental impact shifting in the global economy., OSF Preprints

Consumption of imported goods whose production affects the natural environment abroad implies international ``insourcing'' of consumer benefits and ``outsourcing'' of environmental impacts. We examine to what extent consumer choices driving such ecological outsourcing in the aggregate, often from the Global North to the Global South, are motivated by environmental NIMBY (not in my backyard) preferences. The analysis relies on an original survey-embedded choice experiment in three large, high-income economies (Germany, Japan, United States, total N=7,494). We find considerable support for environmental NIMBYism in consumer decisions. Whereas consumers generally tend to prefer domestically sourced products, this home bias becomes weaker with increasing environmental impacts of production. One important implication of this finding is that policy makers should address potential unintended side-effects of more stringent eco-labeling requirements. The latter may in fact contribute to further ecological outsourcing by making both information on environmental impacts and product provenance more explicit., OSF Preprints