Shadow Prices for Undesirables in Swedish Industry: Indication of Environmental Kuznets Curves?

In this note, we estimate time series of shadow prices for Swedish emissions of CO2, SO2 , and VOC for the period 1918 - 1994. The shadow prices are in the second step related to income to explain the environmental Kuznets curves previously found for Swedish data on the three emissions. A Shephard distance function approach is used to estimate a structural model of the industry’s production process in order to calculate the opportunity costs of a reduction in the emissions. We conclude that the times series of the shadow prices obtained using this approach do not show support for EKCs for Swedish industry