Fears that globalization necessarily hurts the environment are not well-founded. A survey reveals little statistical evidence, on average across countries, that openness to international trade undermines national attempts at environmental regulation through a race to the bottom' effect. If...

Evidence suggests that some pollutants follow an inverse-U-shaped pattern relative to countries' incomes. This relationship has been called the out a simple and straight-forward static model of the microfoundations of the pollution-income relationship. We show that the environmental Kuznets...

This paper reviews both theory and empirical work on economic growth and the environment. We develop four simple growth models to help us identify key features generating sustainable growth. We show how some combination of technological progress in abatement, intensified abatement, shifts in the...

For the last ten years environmentalists and the trade policy community have engaged in a heated debate over the environmental consequences of liberalized trade. The debate was originally fueled by negotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay round of GATT...

Using a new specification, we reanalyze the data on worldwide environmental quality investigated by Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger in a well-known paper on the environmental Kuznets curve (which postulates an inverse U shaped relationship between income level and pollution). The new...

We demonstrate that a key empirical finding in environmental economics - The Environmental Kuznets Curve - and the core model of modern macroeconomics - the Solow model - are intimately related. Once we amend the Solow model to incorporate technological progress in abatement, the EKC is a...

In a paper presented to the Royal Meteorological Society, Brodie (1905) presented a data series that presaged the modern Environmental Kuznets Curve: in the decades leading up to 1890, the number of foggy days in London rose steadily, but after 1891, the fogs began to subside. Brodie attributed...

Corrupt officials can use their positions to enrich themselves in two ways. They can steal from the state budget--embezzling or misspending funds--or they can demand extra payments from citizens in return for services--bribery. In many circumstances, embezzlement is less distortionary than...