European Consumers’ Attitudes towards the Environment and Sustainable Behavior in the Market

Abstract

The scope of this paper is to analyze European consumers’ attitudes and behavior towards the environment. The paper has the following main objectives: measuring homogeneity and heterogeneity within and between European countries with reference to citizens’ involvement with environmental issues, verifying the relationship between attitude and behavior, and identifying factors that might favor sustainable actions and consumption. The hierarchical nature of the data requires the estimation of multilevel models, specifically multilevel latent class models to cluster citizens and countries and multilevel logistic regression models to correlate green actions with environmental attitudes and sociodemographic characteristics. Six homogeneous groups of citizens with different levels of sensibility towards environmental topics were identified, and four groups of European countries were identified with similar compositions in terms of clusters of citizens. The analyses indicate that there is a direct influence of attitude towards the environment on behavior. Estimation results also show significant effects of consumers’ sociodemographic characteristics.