a dynamic approach to the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis states that pollution levels increase as a country develops but begin to decrease as rising incomes pass beyond a turning point in ekc analyses the relationship between environmental degradation and income is usually expressed as a quadratic function with the turning point occurring at a maximum pollution level other explanatory variables have been included in these models but income regularly has had the most significant effect on indicators of environmental quality one variable consistently omitted in these relationships is the price of energy this paper analyzes previous models to illustrate the importance of prices in these models and then includes prices in an econometric ekc framework testing energy income and co2 income relationships these long run price income models find that income is no longer the most relevant indicator of environmental quality or energy demand indeed we find no significant evidence for the existence of an ekc within the range of current incomes for energy in the presence of price and trade variables

tradeable permits missing markets and technology this paper examines the effects of missing markets heterogeneous pollutants and the pollution technology of firms on the efficacy of transferable pollution permits under the assumption of perfect competition in all markets we show that if firms can substitute among pollutants then setting the optimal number of permits for only one pollutant will not in general lead to an efficient outcome the degree of the inefficiency will depend on the information set available to the regulator and the substitutability among pollutants by firms when establishing transferable pollution rights regulators should therefore consider the technology of firms if firms discharge pollutants in the same fixed proportions then the regulator need only set a market for one of the pollutants to ensure an efficient outcome where firms can substitute among pollutants however establishing a market for only one pollutant provides an incentive for firms to substitute to unregulated ones this is an important policy issue as substitutability among pollutants within and across production processes may dampen the dynamic advantages of a tradeable permit policy

industrial pollution in economic development the environmental kuznets curve revisited abstract using new international data this paper tests the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis for industrial water pollution we measure the effect of income growth on three determinants of pollution the share of industry in national output the share of polluting sectors in industrial output and end of pipe eop pollution intensities per unit of output in the polluting sectors we find that the industry share of national output follows a kuznets type trajectory but the other two determinants do not when combined our results imply rejection of the ekc hypothesis for industrial water pollution it rises rapidly through middle income status and remains roughly constant thereafter

the environmental kuznets curve and flow versus stock pollution the neglect of future damages in this paper we offer a possible explanation for the empirical finding that the pollution income relationship pir for flow pollutants is an environmental kuznets curve ekc i e inverted u shaped but that the pir for stock pollutants is monotonically rising we analyse an overlapping generations model with two pollutants the flow pollutant causes immediate damages but the stock pollutant harms the environment only in the future hence a succession of myopic governments lets stock pollution grow with income in contrast the flow pollutant follows an ekc whose downturn might be caused by the neglect of future damages and by ever rising stock pollution without the stock pollutant the pir for the flow pollutant can increase monotonically we also show that the turning point of the ekc for the flow pollutant lies at lower levels of income and of flow pollution if stock pollution is high and harmful this casts doubts on most empirical ekc studies because they assume that the turning point occurs at the same income level in all countries however it is consistent with recent empirical findings that the income level at the turning point of the ekc varies across countries

political and economic inequality and the environment abstract this paper analyzes and tests the hypothesis that political and economic equality result in lower levels of environmental degradation based on formal statements of the argument put forward by boyce r 1994 ecological economics 11 169 178 i show that equality may or may not be necessary to minimize degradation under some plausible conditions greater inequality may even be conducive to lower degradation actual results depend primarily on the intersection between the distribution of preferences across groups and the institutional rules two cross national empirical tests tend to support the contention that distributional issues do not systematically explain variations in environmental quality the results reinforce the conclusion that assumptions about the structure of preferences and workings of social choice institutions ignore complex interactions which influence the relationship between degradation and equality

on environmental kuznets curves arising from stock externalities abstract we develop a stock externality model in an optimal growth framework and examine the relationship between economic growth and the environment we find that as incomes rise over the growth path both the marginal benefits of pollution control and the marginal costs of pollution control rise if at a given income level the marginal benefits rise more than the marginal costs the emissions income relationship has a negative slope at that income level and vice versa we are thus able to generate examples of emissions income relationships of varying shapes by varying pollution specific parameters which determine marginal costs and benefits such as the convexity of the cost function the rate of decay of the stock of pollution and the share of consumption in the composite good an inverted u shape relationship an environmental kuznets curve requires only minimal assumptions a convex cost function and that environmental quality is a normal good imply an inverted u shape relationship for an open set of parameters we also examine how environment income relationship varies according to what measure is used for the environment emissions stock of pollution or emissions control

neoclassical growth the j curve for abatement and the inverted u curve for pollution abstract this paper reexamines the neoclassical environmental growth model of forster to gain insights into the dynamic relationships among pollution abatement effort and economic development whereas the model has heretofore been used to examine steady state levels of capital consumption and environmental quality it also provides a theoretical basis for recent empirical research on j curves for abatement effort and inverted u curves for pollution

stoking the fires co2 emissions and economic growth abstract we examine the relationship between economic development and carbon dioxide emissions a greenhouse gas central to global warming predictions estimates derived from global panel data suggest a diminishing marginal propensity to emit mpe carbon dioxide as gdp per capita rises despite this global carbon dioxide emissions growth will continue at 1 8 percent per annum for the foreseeable future a result that is not sensitive to average output growth instead emissions growth continues because output and population will grow most rapidly in lower income nations with high mpes this latter feature emphasizes the distributional consequences of policies to reduce emissions

nonhomothetic growth models for the environmental kuznets curve we show the role of the elasticity of substitution between general consumption and the environment in environmental degradation specifically our numerical experiments demonstrate for a wide range of models exponential utility generates the environmental kuznets curve without adding any special assumptions with exponential utility the elasticity of substitution and hence the substitution effect between consumption and the environment are both decreasing in income hence when income is low society the government readily gives up environmental quality in return for more consumption but it does not want to substitute consumption for the environment anymore once it becomes wealthy enough

determinants of co2 emissions in a small open economy abstract the aim of the paper is to explore the relationship between economic development and carbon dioxide co2 emissions for a small open and industrialized country austria we test whether an environmental kuznets curve relationship also holds for a single country rather than concentrating on panel or cross section data for a set of countries a cubic i e n shaped relationship between gdp and co2 emissions is found to fit the data most appropriately for the period 1960 1999 and a structural break is identified in the mid seventies due to the oil price shock furthermore two variables are additionally significant import shares reflecting the well known pollution haven hypothesis and the share of the tertiary service sector of total production gdp accounting for structural changes in the economy emission projections derived from this single country specification support the widely held opinion that significant policy changes are asked for when implementing the kyoto protocol in order to bring about a downturn in future carbon emissions

water works the economic impact of water infrastructure abstract billions of hours are spent each year on water collection in developing countries this paper explores whether improvements in water technologies which decrease household distance to drinking water source and the time intensity of home production enable changes in household time allocation and thereby productivity gains in kyrgyzstan adults reallocate time to leisure and labor on the household farm average yearly household cereals production increased significantly results imply a rate of return to labor equaling 0 11 hour approximately half the hourly farm wage absent evidence of improved adult health results suggest that productivity gains were realized primarily through increased farm labor

transboundary externalities in the environmental transition hypothesis the environmental kuznets curve ekc is a hypothesis which implies that it is possible to grow out of environmental degradation most theoretical models of the ekc relation have not accounted for transboundary and intergenerational externalities nor have empirical studies provided evidence that validates an inverted u shaped relation between environmental degradation and economic growth for pollution problems where the effects are far displaced or are long delayed

global observation of ekc hypothesis for co2 sox and nox emission a policy understanding for climate change mitigation in bangladesh abstract environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis is critical to understanding the developmental path of a nation in relation to its environment how the effects of economic development processes dictate environmental changes can be found through the study of ekc to understand the ekc phenomena for climate change this study was undertaken by reviewing the available literature as co2 sox and nox are the significant greenhouse gases ghg responsible for global warming thus leading to climate change the study focused on those ghgs for ekc consideration with an understanding of the different ekc trajectories an attempt was made to determine the implications for the economic development of bangladesh in regards to the ekc it was shown that ekc for co2 was following a monotonous straight line in most cases sox were shown to follow the full trajectory of the ekc in most situations and nox was shown the hope only for the developed countries getting the low income turning point the type of economic policy that bangladesh should follow in regards to the discussed pollutants and sources is also revealed from these discussions contributions to policy stimulation in bangladesh are likely to be made

the determinants of atmospheric so2 concentrations reconsidering the environmental kuznets curve this analysis explores the effects of income and the spatial intensity of economic activity on the atmospheric concentration of sulfur dioxide the results indicate that there is a u shaped relation between income and atmospheric concentration of so2 and an inverted u shaped relation between the spatial intensity of economic activity and so2 concentrations these results suggest that the spatial intensity of economic activity rather than income provides the impetus for policies and technologies that reduce so2 emissions based on this result the atmospheric concentration of so2 in developing nations may decline faster than indicated by previous analyses the potential for this decline depends on the rate at which income grows relative to population the trade off between the effects of income gains and the spatial intensity of economic activity on the atmospheric concentration of so2 is consistent with the notion that some environmental problems can be ameliorated by slowing population growth and increasing income levels

is there an environmental kuznets curve for deforestation abstract this paper examines the relationship between deforestation and gross domestic product gdp per capita in particular whether an inverted u relationship indicative of worsening then improving deforestation exists between them we note that previous work has used models with restrictive assumptions and recommend a more flexible random coefficients specification which allows for a greater degree of cross country heterogeneity empirical results using data for 76 developing countries between 1961 1992 suggest that the inverted u shaped relationship observed in other studies does not appear to be an empirical regularity with our less restrictive specification statistical tests indicate that this specification is supported by the data we argue that such results are not surprising in view of the wide diversity of physical and social characteristics that exist across countries

lemon technologies and adoption measurement theory and evidence from agricultural markets in uganda to reduce poverty and food insecurity in africa requires raising productivity in agriculture systematic use of fertilizer and hybrid seed is a pathway to increased productivity but adoption of these technologies remains low we investigate whether the quality of agricultural inputs can help explain low take up testing modern products purchased in local markets we find that 30 of nutrient is missing in fertilizer and hybrid maize seed is estimated to contain less than 50 authentic seeds we document that such low quality results in low average returns if authentic technologies replaced these low quality products however average returns are high to rationalize the findings we calibrate a learning model using data from our agricultural trials because agricultural yields are noisy farmers ability to learn about quality is limited and this can help explain the low quality equilibrium we observe but also why the market has not fully collapsed

economic growth and atmospheric pollution in spain discussing the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc hypothesis posits an inverted u relationship between environmental pressure and per capita income recent research has examined this hypothesis for different pollutants in different countries despite certain empirical evidence showing that some specific environmental pressures have diminished in developed countries the hypothesis could not be generalized to the global relationship between economy and environment at all in this article we contribute to this debate analyzing the trends of annual emission flux of six atmospheric pollutants in spain the study presents evidence that there is not any correlation between higher income level and smaller emissions except for so2 whose evolution might be compatible with the ekc hypothesis the authors argue that the relationship between income level and diverse types of emissions depends on many factors thus it cannot be thought that economic growth by itself will solve environmental problems

are there limits to growth a simple theoretical model of pollution is developed that generates an inverted u shape relationship between per capita income and environmental quality this model is then used to study long run growth the same inverted u shape is shown to appear in time series and the prospects for sustained growth are shown to hinge on whether increasingly strict environmental regulation is compatible with a constant rate of return on capital implementation is also studied tax and voucher schemes are shown to have an advantage over direct regulation because they provide the correct incentives for capital accumulation copyright 1998 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

carbon intensity and economic development 1962 1991 a brief exploration of the environmental kuznets curve the relationship between national carbon dioxide emissions intensity co2 emitted per unit of gross domestic product and level of economic development has changed from essentially linear in 1962 to strongly curvilinear in 1991 the inverted u curve reached statistical significance briefly in the early 1970s and increasingly since 1982 this is the result not of groups of countries passing through stages of development but of efficiency improvements in a small number of wealthy countries combined with worse performance in poor and middle income countries the curvilinear relation is deepening and is likely to persist due to constraints on poorer countries in the world economy

carbon dioxide emissions and economic growth an assessment based on production and consumption emission inventories working with a new dataset on comparable global co2 production and consumption inventories spanning the 1997 2011 period we investigate the relationship between real gross domestic product gdp per capita and co2 emissions per capita associated with both production and consumption activities by including linkages between production based emissions in one country and final consumption in another via cross border value chains we focus on the entire carbon chain we estimate polynomial and threshold models accounting for reverse causality and identification problems we find that the income elasticity for both inventories is regime dependent and reflects small carbon efficiency gains from economic development carbon footprints show larger income elasticities while national policy instruments targeting production can clearly be circumvented by carbon embodied in intermediate trade this implies problems of environmental sustainability that may require consumption based policy instruments

economic models for the environmental kuznets curve a survey abstract the environmental kuznets curve ekc refers to an inverted u shaped relationship between some pollutant level and per capita income i e the environmental quality deteriorates at early stages of economic growth and subsequently improves at a later stage since the early 1990s a considerable number of empirical studies have been conducted on the ekc and although there is no conclusive proof it has been recognized that the ekc emerges as an empirical regularity however some recent studies cast doubt on the concept and methodology of empirical results and evidence of the existence of the ekc has been questioned in fact how economic growth affects the environmental quality i e the shape of the ekc is still controversial in order to identify the actual relationship between the environmental quality and economic growth it is essential to develop economic models from various points of view this paper overviews the current stage of theoretical models that explain such relationship

corruption and the environmental kuznets curve empirical evidence for sulfur abstract we investigate how corruption influences the income level at the turning point of the relationship between sulfur emissions and income using a wide cross national panel of countries at different levels of development and with different degrees of corruption our results support the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis for sulfur we find evidence that the higher the country s degree of corruption the higher the per capita income at the turning point suggesting different income pollution paths across countries due to corruption we build upon a new specification for the ekc developed by bradford et al 2005 that avoids using nonlinear transformations of potentially nonstationary regressors in panel estimation also we account for the indirect impact of corruption on emissions through its impact on per capita income our main findings remain unchanged when we investigate additional heterogeneity allowing for different income slopes across richer and poorer countries

how high are rates of return to fertilizer evidence from field experiments in kenya the idea that peasant farmers are rational profit maximizers has been a staple of development economics since theodore schultz 1964 it has also been influential in shaping policy for example agricultural experts have stressed the importance of fertilizer use in raising agricultural yields pointing to impressive results on experimental farms and to huge differences in agricultural productivity across countries with different levels of fertilizer use robert evenson and douglas gollin 2003 historically many countries subsidized fertilizer in response but economists have been skeptical of claims that farmers are leaving money on the table noting that fertilizer may not have the same returns on real world farms as on experimental farms that returns to fertilizer may be low for many farmers even if they are high on average tavneet suri 2007 that fertilizer may require complementary inputs or may be risky many countries have withdrawn or scaled back fertilizer psychology and development theory and experimental evidence

air quality and economic growth an empirical study abstract in the present empirical study we have observed an inverse and sometimes u shaped relationship between environmental degradation and per capita real income as opposed to the inverted u shaped environmental kuznets curve ekc found in many earlier studies it was felt that a possible explanation of the observed pattern of relationship might be sought in the dynamics of the process of economic growth experienced by the countries concerned thus e g economic development may strengthen the market mechanism as a result of which the economy may gradually shift from non market to marketed energy resources that are less polluting this phenomenon may show up in the form of an inverse relationship as mentioned above also due to the global technical progress the production techniques available to the countries all over the world are becoming more and more capital intensive and at the same time less polluting this may mean that given the income level the pollution level decreases as the capital intensity of an economy rises in the present study it is indeed observed that as capital intensity increases the level of suspended particulate matter spm in the atmosphere decreases per capita real income is also found to be inversely related to spm partially but the interaction effect of per capita income and capital intensity on spm is observed to be positive this suggests that given the level of per capita income capital intensity a more capital intensive production technique a higher per capita income level would cause less pollution for spm a surprising result is also obtained i e a u turn is observed at a very high level of per capita real income i e us 12 500 at 1985 us prices this is possibly indicative of the fact that there are technological limits to industrial pollution control such that beyond a threshold level of income further rise in income cannot be achieved without environmental degradation

nudging farmers to use fertilizer theory and experimental evidence from kenya we model farmers as facing small fixed costs of purchasing fertil izer and assume some are stochastically present biased and not fully sophisticated about this bias such farmers may procrastinate post poning fertilizer purchases until later periods when they may be too impatient to purchase fertilizer consistent with the model many farmers in western kenya fail to take advantage of apparently profit able fertilizer investments but they do invest in response to small time limited discounts on the cost of acquiring fertilizer free deliv ery just after harvest calibration suggests that this policy can yield higher welfare than either laissez faire policies or heavy subsidies

the environmental consequences of trade evidence from subnational trade flows abstract the debate over the environmental consequences of free trade is not only quite heated but also entails significant policy ramifications recently cross sectional analysis at the country level has made use of exogenous determinants of trade to identify the causal effect of trade on the environment finding moderate evidence of a beneficial impact of expanded trade on environmental quality given the stakes involved we revisit this finding using subnational data on trade flows across us states and several measures of pollution not only does the analysis shed further light on the debate at the international level but also addresses a heretofore unexamined question does greater inter regional commerce at the subnational level harm the environment our findings are striking providing further evidence against a negative environmental impact of trade for the majority of measures analyzed however several sources of heterogeneity arise that are noteworthy

municipal waste kuznets curves evidence on socio economic drivers and policy effectiveness from the eu waste generation and waste disposal are becoming increasingly prominent in the environmental arena from a policy perspective and in the context of delinking analysis in general waste generation is still increasing proportionally with income and economic and environmental costs associated to landfilling are also increasing this paper provides a comprehensive analysis of waste generation incineration and landfill dynamics based on panel data for the eu25 to assess the effects of different drivers economic structural policy and the eventual differences between western and eastern eu countries we show that for waste generation there is still no waste kuznets curve wkc trend although elasticity to income drivers appears lower than in the past landfill and other policy effects do not seem to provide backward incentives for waste prevention and in terms of landfill and incineration as expected they are respectively decreasing and increasing with policy acting as a strong driver eastern countries appear to be performing generally quite well thus benefiting from eu membership and related policies in terms of environmental performance we can conclude that although absolute delinking is far from being achieved for waste generation there are some first positive signs of an increasing relative delinking for waste generation and robust landfill diversion and varying evidence of a significant role of the eu waste policies implemented in the late 1990s and early 2000s our evidence suggests that if while landfill diversion is currently associated to a delinking partly explained by eu policies waste prevention must be the next objective of waste regulation efforts

profitability of fertilizer experimental evidence from female rice farmers in mali abstract we conducted an experiment providing fertilizer grants to female rice farmers in mali we found that women who received fertilizer used both more fertilizer and more complementary inputs s

optimal management of environmental externalities with time lags and uncertainty many environmental externalities occur with time lags that can range from a few days to several centuries in length and many of these externalities are also subject to uncertainty in this paper we examine the key features of an optimal policy to manage environmental externalities that are both lagged and stochastic we develop a two period two polluter model and obtain closed form solutions for optimal emissions levels under different combinations of damage functions and stochastic processes these solutions show that it is not obvious whether greater control should be exerted on polluters that generate externalities with longer lags or on polluters that generate externalities with shorter lags we find that the optimal ranking of polluters with respect to the length of the time lag associated with their externality will depend on a the discount rate b conditional expectations of future states of the polluted resource c persistence of the pollutant and d initial conditions

a dynamic model of the environmental kuznets curve turning point and public policy we set up a simple dynamic macroeconomic model with i polluting consumption and a preference for a clean environment ii increasing returns in abatement giving rise to an ekc and iii sustained growth resulting from a linear final output technology there are two sorts of market failures caused by external effects associated with consumption and environmental effort the model is employed to investigate the determinants of the turning point and the cost effectiveness of different public policies aimed at a reduction of the environmental burden moreover the model offers a potential explanation of an n shaped pollution income relation it is shown that the model is compatible with most empirical regularities on economic growth and the environment

an estimate of the age distribution s effect on carbon dioxide emissions i introduction we exploit temporal and geographic demographic variation to estimate the relationship between a population s age distribution and carbon dioxide c o sub 2 emissions in a panel of 46 countries from 1990 to 2006 to reduce potential omitted variable bias we instrument for the age distribution with lagged birth rates and control for total population and total gross domestic product gdp a higher share of prime working age 35 49 individuals within a country leads to higher c o sub 2 emissions while younger and older populations have lower c o sub 2 emissions according to our results emissions of c o sub 2 account for about half of the radiative forcing from anthropogenic sources that are considered the primary contributors to global warming the intergovernmental panel on climate change 2007 predicts increases in average surface temperatures in the range of 1 1 6 4 degrees c 2 11 5 degrees f by the end of the century climate change has created the threat of substantial environmental damage with the possibility of catastrophic consequences for many throughout the world as a result both academics and policy makers are interested in c o sub 2 emissions the literature aimed at explaining c o sub 2 emissions usually focuses on the size and affluence of the population this approach can be traced back to the seminal work by ehrlich and holdren 1971 the biologist and physicist who argued that population size has a disproportionate impact on the environment the impact is generally assumed to depend upon technology leading to the well known ipat identity or kaya identity for c o sub 2 emissions i p x a x t where i is environmental impact p is population size a is affluence gdp per capita and t is a technology index more recent literature has focused on models of the technology index and how the index changes over time e g due to improvements in abatement technology the widely cited intergovernmental panel on climate change studies use several variations of the ipat model to produce regional emissions forecasts which are then aggregated to the global level structural studies by economists e g nordhaus 2009 have also attempted to forecast global c o sub 2 emissions using estimates of gdp from production functions and world population size although these studies have frequently used geographic density of the population as well as its size as explanatory variables and have allowed for nonlinearity in size most have ignored the age distribution within the population 1 a few papers have begun to address this potential oversight by explicitly including the age distribution in studies of c o sub 2 emissions dalton et al 2008 build a structural overlapping generations model to forecast u s c o sub 2 emissions 2 in their model simulations population aging has a big effect on future emissions our empirical findings support dalton et al 2008 but our approach is most closely related to cole and neumayer 2004 3 cole and neumayer 2004 also use a cross country panel to estimate the effect of demographic change on c o sub 2 emissions in an ipat type regression model while cole and neumayer 2004 include age group shares as controls the groups younger than 15 15 64 and 65 are too wide to capture the effect we posit and they do not instrument for the age distribution as we do cole and neumayer 2004 mainly focus on changes in total population whereas we are interested in the age distribution effect for a given population size our ordinary least square ols estimates indicate that a country s level of c o sub 2 emissions depends on its age distribution in addition to population size the regressions include total gdp and a full set of time and country dummies as controls we use the fraction of the population aged 35 49 or working share as the main explanatory variable changes in the working share across time not common to all countries and independent of gdp and total population provide the variation used to estimate the age distribution s effect

technological innovations downside risk and the modernization of agriculture we use a randomized experiment in india to show that improved technology enhances agricultural productivity by crowding in modern inputs and cultivation practices specifically we show that a new rice variety that reduces downside risk by providing flood tolerance has positive effects on adoption of a more labor intensive planting method area cultivated fertilizer usage and credit utilization we find that a large share of the expected gains from the technology comes from crowding in of other investments therefore improved technologies that reduce risk by protecting production in bad years have the potential to increase agricultural productivity in normal years

income inequality and pollution a reassessment of the environmental kuznets curve abstract improvements in some measures of air and water quality can accompany rising per capita income as illustrated by the so called environmental kuznets curve for pollution variables which show such a relationship we hypothesize that a more equitable distribution of power contributes to these outcomes by enhancing the influence on policy of those who bear the costs of pollution relative to the influence of those who benefit from pollution generating activities an empirical analysis of international variations in seven indicators of air and water quality supports this hypothesis literacy political rights and civil liberties are found to have particularly strong effects on environmental quality in low income countries

currency crises and the stock market empirical evidence for another type of twin crisis we explore the dependency between currency crises and the stock market in emerging economies our focus is two fold first the risk of a currency crisis rises as the foreign stake in the domestic stock market increases successful economies with high capital flows into their booming stock markets especially are prone to stock market induced currency crises second we apply the dividend growth model to show that stock markets crash in the run up to a currency crisis this new type of twin crisis is empirically tested by employing a logit framework using quarterly data for 33 emerging economies for 1994q1 2007q4

ekc type transitions and environmental policy under pollutant uncertainty and cost irreversibility abstract previous studies have suggested that some pollutant levels first increases due to the economic growth and then start decreasing the pattern being called the environmental kuznets curve ekc we examine ekc type transitions of pollutant levels not with respect to economic growth but more generally in time assuming that each policy maker optimally executes the two switching options of regulation and unregulation for pollution the switching dynamics of environmental policy can be described by an alternating renewal process it is shown that the double laplace transform of transition density of a pollutant level can be obtained by a novel application of renewal theory the expected level of overall pollutants is then calculated numerically and found to exhibit either a shaped or an n shaped pattern in time our results present a simple explanation for the ekc type transitions of pollutant levels within a real options framework

the environmental kuznets curve does one size fit all abstract this paper uses a new panel data set on state level sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from 1929 1994 to test the appropriateness of the one size fits all reduced form regression approach commonly used in the environmental kuznets curve literature empirical results provide initial evidence that an inverted u shape characterizes the relationship between per capita emissions and per capita incomes at the state level parameter estimates suggest however that previous studies which restrict cross sections to undergo identical experiences over time may be presenting statistically biased results

an overlapping generations model of growth and the environment this article analyzes the potential conflict between economic growth and the maintenance of environmental quality in an overlapping generations model short lived individuals make decisions which have long lasting effects on both factor productivity and the environment the model provides a theoretical explanation of observed correlations between environmental quality and income whereby economic growth is associated first with declines then improvements in environmental quality it suggests circumstances in which multiple pareto ranked steady state equilibria may arise and in which sustained growth of both capital and environmental quality may occur overmaintenance of the environment analogous to dynamically inefficient overaccumulation of capital may emerge copyright 1994 by royal economic society

agricultural decisions after relaxing credit and risk constraints the investment decisions of small scale farmers in developing countries are conditioned by their financial environment binding credit market constraints and incomplete insurance can limit investment in activities with high expected profits we conducted several experiments in northern ghana in which farmers were randomly assigned to receive cash grants grants of or opportunities to purchase rainfall index insurance or a combination of the two demand for index insurance is strong and insurance leads to significantly larger agricultural investment and riskier production choices in agriculture the binding constraint to farmer investment is uninsured risk when provided with insurance against the primary catastrophic risk they face farmers are able to find resources to increase expenditure on their farms demand for insurance in subsequent years is strongly increasing with the farmer s own receipt of insurance payouts with the receipt of payouts by others in the farmer s social network and with recent poor rain in the village both investment patterns and the demand for index insurance are consistent with the presence of important basis risk associated with the index insurance imperfect trust that promised

is there an environmental kuznets curve for sulfur abstract most existing estimates of the environmental kuznets curve ekc for sulfur which use samples of mainly high income countries indicate a maximum emissions turning point at middle to lower high income levels of gdp per capita we use a larger and more globally representative sample than previous sulfur ekc studies we find that sulfur emissions per capita are a monotonic function of income per capita when we use a global sample and an inverted u shape function of income when we use a sample of high income countries a model estimated in first differences results in a monotonic ekc when estimated with both high income and global samples reductions in emissions are time related rather than income related

preferences technology and the environment understanding the environmental kuznets curve hypothesis we derive a simple expression for the income pollution path using the standard static model of the environmental kuznets curve ekc this expression makes it straightforward to identify the general characteristics of utility and pollution functions that lead to such a curve we show that suitable preferences can always lead to an ekc while there is no technology that yields an ekc for all types of preferences and we derive a sufficient condition for technology that leads to an ekc for almost all types of preferences our results hold for a model with multiple goods with different pollution intensities and for a production economy with nonconstant relative price of consumption and environmental effort we derive our results without assuming specific functional forms and we encompass several other models as special cases