Economic growth and global particulate pollution concentrations

David Stern and Jeremy van Dijk

CCEP Working Papers from Centre for Climate & Energy Policy, Crawford School of Public Policy, The Australian National University

Abstract: Though the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) was originally developed to model the ambient concentrations of pollutants, most subsequent applications focused on pollution emissions. Yet, previous research suggests that it is more likely that economic growth could eventually reduce the concentrations of local pollutants than emissions. We examine the role of income, convergence, and time related factors in explaining changes in PM2.5 pollution in a global panel of 158 countries between 1990 and 2010. We find that economic growth has positive but relatively small effects, time effects are also small but larger in wealthier and formerly centrally planned economies, and, for our main dataset, convergence effects are small and not statistically significant. There is no in-sample income turning point for regressions that include both the convergence variables and a set of control variables.

Keywords: air pollution; economic growth; environmental Kuznets curve (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O44 Q53 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene, nep-env, nep-gro and nep-res
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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https://ccep.crawford.anu.edu.au/sites/default/fil ... 2016-03/ccep1604.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Economic growth and global particulate pollution concentrations (2017)
Working Paper: Economic growth and global particulate pollution concentrations (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:een:ccepwp:1604

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