Suchergebnisse

In a widely cited paper, Andreoni and Levinson (2001) argue that, under very mild restrictions on preferences, increasing returns to scale in pollution abatement are a sufficient condition for pollution to ultimately fall to zero with income growth. We show that the existence of an Environmental Kuznets Curve depends on the relative magnitudes of the returns to scale in abatement and in gross pollution, rather than on their absolute values. Increasing returns to scale in abatement by themselves are not sufficient for pollution to fall with income unless the returns to scale of abatement exceed the returns to the production of gross pollution.

Country-level analyses of global Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) relationships that use multicountry panel data sets are likely to suffer from several types of aggregation bias that may explain why previous studies have yielded conflicting results. The authors analyze 1990 cross-sectional data for the United States for three pollutants and test the general EKC relationship as well as the pure income effect. Their results suggest that the income level at which households reduce their exposure to pollution depends on the nature of the pollutant. They find consistent evidence for such a relationship for coarse particulate matter but little evidence for nonmonotonic relationships for carbon monoxide and ground-level ozone.

AbstractAmong sources of public revenue that make nations richer, the most beneficial are charges for harms, such as pollution and congestion, and charges for the private benefits from public services. Increases in the money supply sufficient to keep price changes in line with expectations are also beneficial. Taxes on concentrations of wealth are beneficial if wealth inequality is considered harmful. Properly administered taxes on land do no harm and are beneficial when markets are imperfect. Among taxes that cause harm, the combination of a tax on labour income and a tax on inheritances is probably the least damaging.