Environment and economic development: determinants of an EKC hypothesis

George Halkos

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In this paper we examine the concept of an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis in a critical way aiming to justify its existence as well as to propose policies compatible with sustainable development. For this reason, we make use of a data set on CO2 emissions for 32 countries over a 36 year time period. For this balanced panel database, we apply a number of econometric methods to estimate the income-environment relationship. Our results indicate the existence of N-shaped relationship between economic development and pollution. However we show that the turning points calculated by panel data analysis may not reveal the actual turning points valid for individual countries. In our case and using different countries from different geographical regions we found a mixture of monotonic or inverted U-shape or N-shape behaviour. Countries are heterogeneous with different stochastic regression coefficients. This implies that the use of the total N-shape income-environment relationship by policy makers may be misleading with serious policy ineffectiveness implications.

Keywords: Environmental Kuznets Curve; Panel Data; CO2 emissions (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C23 O20 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/33262/1/MPRA_paper_33262.pdf original version (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:pra:mprapa:33262

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().