Environmental Kuznets curve for CO2 emissions: a literature survey

By Muhammad Shahbaz, Avik Sinha. Journal of Economic Studies, 2019

495 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey of the empirical literature on environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) estimation of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over the period of 1991–2017. Design/methodology/approach This survey categorizes the studies on the basis of power of income in empirical models of EKC. It has been hypothesized that the EKC shows an inverted U-shaped association between economic growth and CO2 emissions. Findings For all the contexts, the results of EKC estimation for CO2 emissions are inconclusive in nature. The reasons behind this discrepancy can be attributed to the choice of contexts, time period, explanatory variables, and methodological adaptation. Research limitations/implications The future studies in this context should not only consider new set of variables (e.g. corruption index, social indicators, political scenario, energy research and development expenditures, foreign capital inflows, happiness, population education structure, public investment toward alternate energy exploration, etc.), but also the data set should be refined, so that the EKC estimation issues raised by Stern (2004) can be addressed. Originality/value By far, no study in the literature of ecological economics has focused on the empirical estimation of EKC for CO2 emissions. This particular context has been used for this study, as CO2 is one of the highest studied pollutants in the ecological economics, and especially within the EKC hypothesis framework.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Marketing

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7834fad4debb8985015768978987a85ad2d1f9b3

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Citations in the corpus

Does Export product diversification help to reduce energy demand: Exploring the contextual evidences from the newly industrialized countries (2021, background): “Further, non-renewable energy consumption has been considered as a driver of environmental degradation and climate change issues (Imbs and Wacziarg, 2003; Sorrell, 2015; Shahbaz and Sinha, 2019; Shahbaz, et al., 2019).”
Environmental policy stringency, renewable energy consumption and CO2 emissions: Panel cointegration analysis for BRIICTS countries (2020, background): “…that show that renewable energy consumption is beneficial to environmental quality (e.g. see Bekun, Emir, and Sarkodie 2019; Bilgili, Koçak, and Bulut 2016; Dong et al. 2017; Ito 2017; Nguyen and Kakinaka 2019; Sebri and Ben-Salha, 2014; Shahbaz and Sinha 2019; Shahbaz et al. 2018; Zoundi 2017).”
Does Economic Policy Uncertainty Affect CO2 Emissions? Empirical Evidence from the United States (2020, methodology): “At this stage, previous papers have used different indicators of energy usage, and they have mostly considered the oil price to include the price effect in EKC modeling [3].”
Foreign direct Investment–CO2 emissions nexus in Middle East and North African countries: Importance of biomass energy consumption (2019, background): “11 has been extensively outlined in the literature of the EKC (Shafik and Bandyopadhyay, 1992; Stern et al., 1996; Stern, 2004; Dinda, 2004; Shahbaz and Sinha, 2019).”
Does renewable energy consumption reduce ecological footprint? Evidence from eight developing countries of Asia (2020, background): “, 2007), and population growth (Shahbaz and Sinha, 2019) have reinforced the distortion of the established ecosystem in the preceding years.”
Analyzing nonlinear impact of economic growth drivers on CO2 emissions: Designing an SDG framework for India (2020, background): “At different levels of income, energy consumption, and population growth rate, the level of environmental pollution may vary significantly as well (Shahbaz et al., 2018b; Shahbaz and Sinha, 2019).”
The role of information and communication technology in encountering environmental degradation: Proposing an SDG framework for the BRICS countries (2021, background): “At the early stages of economic development, the deterioration of the environment such as water and soil contamination, ambient air pollution increases but after a certain level of economic development, the process of deterioration become slow, and a further increase in income leads to improve envir”