Economic growth and the diffusion of clean technologies: explaining environmental Kuznets

Sjak Smulders (), Lucas Bretschger and Hannes Egli

No 05/42, CER-ETH Economics working paper series from CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich

Abstract: Production often causes pollution as a by-product. Once environmental degra- dation becomes too severe, regulation is introduced by which society forces the economy to make a transition to cleaner production processes. We model this transition as a change in "general purpose technology" and investigate how it interferes with economic growth driven by quality-improvements. The model gives an explanation for the inverted U-shaped pollution-income relation found in empirical research for many pollutants (Environmental Kuznets Curve). We provide an analytical foundation for the claim that the rise and decline of pol- lution can be explained by policy-induced technology shifts and intrasectoral changes.

Keywords: Environmental Kuznets curve; general purpose technology; growth; intrasectoral shifts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O41 Q20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages
Date: 2005-08
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (22)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cer.ethz.ch/research/wp_05_42.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not found UA (http://www.cer.ethz.ch/research/wp_05_42.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://www.cer.ethz.ch/research/wp_05_42.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://cer.ethz.ch/research/wp_05_42.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:eth:wpswif:05-42

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CER-ETH Economics working paper series from CER-ETH - Center of Economic Research (CER-ETH) at ETH Zurich Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().