Civic sense and its contribution to recycling activities: Evidence from Italy

This article studies from a conceptual, theoretical and empirical point of view the link between civic sense and recycling activities in Italy related to the years 1998, 2012, 2018, 2019. It establishes a link among the concepts of civic sense, whose essential components are behaviours, attitudes and interactions, with it being a typical traditional theoretical approach with perfectly rational and perfectly informed agents, along with a standard empirical analyses on the determinants of (household) waste recycling. Starting from a game-theoretic model of contribution with particular features related to the objective function of agents and a heterogeneity in their costs, the article aims to highlight how certain theoretical results get together with empirical evidence. In the empirical analysis, using the micro-data of a “Multipurpose Survey on Households” provided by the Italian National Statistical Office and an ordered probit model, the article finds a positive, robust and stable correlation between civic sense and household recycling activities The findings show that a higher civic sense is related to an increase in household recycling activities, respectively, of 1.2 percentage points in 1998, 4.3 percentage points in 2012, and 3.8 percentage points in both 2018 and 2019.