Environmental Kuznets Curve on Country Level: Evidence from China

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis proposes that there is an inverse-U-shape relationship between environmental degradation and per capita income. This evidence has been manifested to be existed in most air pollutants and several water pollutants by estimating on cross-country data. Different from most earlier empirical studies, this paper uses the cross-province panel data of seven pollutants from China to investigate whether the EKC hypothesis may even exist on a country level. The estimated results find out that the EKC hypothesis exists in five of these pollutants, while the other two show a N-shape relationship between pollutant emission and per capita income. Moreover, this paper suggests some problems of this regression as being remained for future study.