The asymmetric effect of environmental policy stringency on CO2 emissions in OECD countries

Claudiu Albulescu (), Maria-Elena Boatca-Barabas and Andra Diaconescu

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: This paper uses a quantile fixed-effect panel data approach to investigate how environmental policy stringency affects CO2 emissions in a set of 32 OECD countries from 1990 to 2015. This approach allows us to identify the asymmetric impact of policy stringency on emissions, considering the emission level recorded in each analysed country. More precisely, we posit that the effectiveness of environmental regulations and policies is influenced by the air pollution level. Our results show that an increase in policy stringency has a negative impact on emissions. As a new contribution, we show that environmental stringency has a more powerful impact in the countries with lower level of carbon emissions. This result is also recorded for the subset of EU member countries of the OECD. Moreover, we show that policy stringency measures only become effective after the implementation of the Kyoto agreement. Finally, the policy stringency effect is stronger for EU countries at high risk of missing the 20-20-20 target in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.

Keywords: CO2 emissions; environmental policies; environmental Kuznets curve; pollution haven hypothesis; panel quantiles regression (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-07-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03303096
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-03303096/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03303096

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().