We examine empirically the effect of natural resource abundance on economic growth. We find that natural resources have a negative impact on growth when considered in isolation, but a positive impact on growth when including in the analysis other variables such as corruption, investments,...

Specializing in tourism is an option available to a number of less developed countries and regions. But is it a good option? To answer this question, we have compared the relative growth performance of 14 "tourism countries" within a sample of 143 countries, observed during the period 1980-95....

There has been a recent economic literature arguing that international environmental agreements (IEAs) can have no real effect, on account of their voluntary and self-enforcing nature. This literature concludes that the terms of IEAs are the codification of the noncooperative equilibrium, and...

A number of recent papers have found that certain measures of pollution worsen and later improve as income per head increases. It is widely believed that the downhill portion of this inverted-U curve reflects an induced policy response; that, as incomes rise, citizens demand improvements in...

This study explores the link between environmental degradation, economic growth and income inequality within the framework of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) literature. To investigate this issue, we examine how inequality affects carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and their relationship with...

In this paper we investigate the existence and shape of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) by means of nonparametric methods. We also investigate the issues involved in the choice of nonparametric estimator. We find that the nature of the economic relationship and the quality of environmental...

In our paper, we test the stability of the unadjusted and adjusted Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). Our results provide evidence in favour of the significance of the adjusted EKC hypothesis in which the impact of per capita GDP on the intensity of CO2 emissions is evaluated conditionally to...

This paper investigates the EKC curves for CO2 emissions in a panel of 109 countries during the period 1959-2001. The length of the series makes the application of a heterogeneous estimator suitable from an econometric point of view. The results, based on the hierarchical Bayes estimator, show...

We analyze the empirical relationship between growth, country size and tourism specialization by using a dataset covering the period 1980-2003. We find that tourism countries grow significantly faster than all the other sub-groups considered in our analysis. Tourism appears to be an independent...