The environmental Kuznets curve in a world of irreversibility

By Fabien Prieur. 2009

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper develops an overlapping generations model where consumption is the source of polluting emissions. Pollution stock accumulates with emissions but is partially assimilated by nature at each period. The assimilation capacity of nature is limited and vanishes beyond a critical level of pollution. We first show that multiple equilibria exist. More importantly, some exhibit irreversible pollution levels although an abatement activity is operative. Thus, the simple engagement of maintenance does not necessarily suffice to protect an economy against convergence toward a steady state having the properties of an ecological and economic poverty trap. In contrast with earlier related studies, the emergence of the environmental Kuznets curve is no longer the rule. Instead, we detect a sort of degenerated environmental Kuznets curve that corresponds to the equilibrium trajectory leading to the irreversible solution.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e86534103a2cfb309206aaa1c9863a587f2574fb

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Citations in the corpus

Energy innovation and renewable energy consumption in the correction of air pollution levels (2017, background): “The scale effect thus decreases environmental quality (Torras and Boyce, 1998; Prieur, 2009). b) Composition effect: the evolution of economic growth appears to be linked to structural transformation, that is, the transition from a developing economy, with highly polluting production processes, to…”