Economic growth as a double-edged sword: The pollution-adjusted Kaldor-Verdoorn effect

Guilherme de Oliveira and Gilberto Lima

Ecological Economics, 2022, vol. 199, issue C

Abstract: There is evidence that pollution concentration impacts negatively on labor productivity, which has implications for the well-know Kaldor-Verdoorn law. While the growth rate of labor productivity varies positively with the growth rate of output, the growth rate of pollution concentration also varies positively with the latter. An increase in pollution concentration leading to environmental degradation might thus offset the productivity-enhancing effect of output growth. This paper explores such a double-edged sword feature of output growth in a demand-led macrodynamic framework having pollution concentration as a further influence on the conflict over the functional distribution of income. The stability of the environment-economy system hinges on how output growth varies with the functional distribution of income. When output growth is wage-led, the balanced growth path is unstable. When output growth is profit-led, stability is possible, but the system undergoes fluctuations as it converges to the balanced growth path.

Keywords: Economic growth; Pollution concentration; Labor productivity; Functional distribution of income (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: E11 O44 Q52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1) Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800922001112
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Economic Growth as a Double-Edged Sword: The Pollution-Adjusted Kaldor-Verdoorn Effect (2021)
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:eee:ecolec:v:199:y:2022:i:c:s0921800922001112

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107449

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().