Age-Structure, Urbanization, and Climate Change in Developed Countries: Revisiting STIRPAT for Disaggregated Population and Consumption-Related Environmental Impacts

Brantley Liddle and Sidney Lung

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: We focus on three environmental impacts particularly influenced by population age-structure—carbon emissions from transport and residential energy and electricity consumption—as well as aggregate carbon emissions for a panel of developed countries, and take as our starting point the STIRPAT framework. Among our contributions is to further disaggregate population into three particularly key age groups: 20-34, 35-49, and 50-64, and by doing so demonstrate that population’s environmental impact differs considerably across age-groups, with the older age-groups (ones typically associated with larger households) actually exerting a negative influence. Furthermore, those age-specific population influences are different (in absolute and relative terms) for the different environmental impacts we analyze. Also, we find that urbanization, in developed countries, best measures access to a country’s power grid, and thus, is positively associated with energy consumption in the residential sector. Lastly, we suggest some modelling and methodological improvements to the STIRPAT framework.

Keywords: STIRPAT; population structural change and environment; carbon dioxide emissions; demography and climate change; panel data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q41 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (167)

Published in Population and Environment 5.31(2010): pp. 317-343

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/59579/1/MPRA_paper_59579.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:59579

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 ().