Does income inequality facilitate carbon emission reduction in the US?

By Cenjie Liu, Yong Jiang, Rui Xie. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019

149 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstrct Considering the short- and long-term impacts of income inequality on carbon emissions, as well as the heterogeneity of the emission distribution, this paper employs panel ARDL and quantile regression models to analyze the effect of income inequality on carbon emissions across US states. The findings suggest that higher income inequality increases US carbon emissions in the short term, whereas it promotes carbon reduction in the long term. Furthermore, we find that the absolute values for the coefficients on income inequality in the states from the 70th to the 90th quantiles are larger than those from the 10th to the 40th quantiles. This indicates that income inequality reduces more carbon emissions in states with higher per capita carbon emissions. The results provide important insights for policy makers to improve the quality of economic development and address climate change.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/40c9b44dba16dc5c51124216febf8ca87a5c5044

Citations in the corpus

• Income inequality, human capital, natural resource abundance, and ecological footprint in ECOWAS member countries (2021, unknown): “Employing both the ARDL and quantile regression to examine inequality-environment nexus in US states, Liu et al. (2019) observed that while higher income inequality stimulates CO 2 emissions in the short-term, it abates emission levels in the long-run.”