Revisiting the literature on the dynamic Environmental Kuznets Curves using a latent structure approach

Saptorshee Chakraborty and Massimiliano Mazzanti

No 521, SEEDS Working Papers from SEEDS, Sustainability Environmental Economics and Dynamics Studies

Abstract: Theories of the association between environmental degradation and economic growth are not new and are very important under current global conditions to understand and tackle challenges like decarbonisation and the circular economy among others. Countries must balance growth with environmental degradation, and in the extensive literature that deals with this association, applied economists have largely used the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) setting, with different empirical methodologies in various data settings. However, under a panel data framework, researchers often assume that countries are similar when dealing with unobservable heterogeneity. The papers exploits one of the methodologies to unveil heterogeneity to determine groupings from the data. We consider the countries that account for nearly 80% of global carbon dioxide emissions and apply the EKC setting. Using a Classifier Lasso framework that applies latent group methodologies to address unobservable heterogeneity, we find for two distinct groups substantial heterogeneity in types of energy consumption (renewable and total) with both positive and negative effects observed in the data. The results provide a new perspective on potential impacts illustrated in the EKC literature that might be relevant to policy makers.

Keywords: EKC; Group Lasso; Latent structure; Unobserved heterogeneity; decarbonisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2021-05, Revised 2021-05
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:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sustainability-seeds.org/papers/RePec/srt/wpaper/0521.pdf First version, 2021 (application/pdf)
http://www.sustainability-seeds.org/papers/RePec/srt/wpaper/0521.pdf Revised version, 2021 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Revisiting the literature on the dynamic Environmental Kuznets Curves using a latent structure approach (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:srt:wpaper:0521

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in SEEDS Working Papers from SEEDS, Sustainability Environmental Economics and Dynamics Studies
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Alessandro Palma ().