Environmental Consciousness among Graduation Students: Comparing Ukraine with Portugal

Abstract

The present study was undertaken to evaluate and compare the environmental consciousness in Ukraine and Portugal and also to measure what is the impact of having this concept in the curricula of formal schooling, the sex and the age of the person. To obtain micro data, as it is usual in the literature, we send a self-administered questionnaires by email to students of the Institute of Finance, Economics and Management of Sumy State University (Ukraine, Sumy) and to students of the Scholl of Economics and Management of the University of Porto (Portugal, Porto) from which we obtained 172 complete responses  104 from Porto and 68 from Sumy. We compute the Index of Environmental Consciousness and the Index of Schooling and we estimate a regression model using Weighted Linear Model from which were are able to conclude that 1) Portugal students have a significantly higher Environmental Consciousness than ones from Ukraine, 2) introducing the concept of Environmental Consciousness in the curricula of formal schooling has not significant impact on the Environmental Consciousness of students, 3) female people have a significantly higher Environmental Consciousness than the male ones and 4) age has a positive but not significant impact on the Environmental Consciousness of the person. Using bootstrapping we investigate whether the assumption of a normal distribution of the error term would not cause catastrophic impact on estimators’ t-statistics test and we concluded that results maintain valid. We observe that the majority of people, 80.1%, have environmental consciousness.