The standard approach to the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) holds that as a country develops and GDP per capita grows environmental degradation initially increases but eventually it reaches a turning point where environmental degradation begins to decline. Environmental degradation takes many...

The number of studies seeking to empirically characterize the reduced-form relationship between a country economic growth and the quantity of pollutants produced in the process has recently increased significantly. In several cases researchers have found evidence pointing to an inverted-U...

This paper casts doubt on empirical results based on panel estimations of an "inverted-U" relationship between per capita GDP and pollution. Using a new data set for OECD countries on carbon dioxide emissions for the period 1960-1997, we find that the crucial assumption of homogeneity across...