Empirical Review
An examination of empirical studies related to the income-environment nexus reveals conflicting findings. The results of empirical works for different environmental indicators have different conclusions. What is more alarming is that, various studies that have been carried out using the same environmental indicator produce mixed findings (Neumayer and Alstine 2010, 52). The following section examines the major statistical forms found from EKC studies.
What are the statistical relationships between various measures of environmental quality and income?
In general, the empirical analysis of the EKC hypothesis tends to produce three qualitative cases shown (see Figure 2 below). From figure 2, pattern A depicts a negative relationship between environmental degradation and economic growth; pattern B depicts an inverted-U shape, while pattern C indicates a positive link concerning environmental degeneration and economic growth. Pattern A is associated with studies which show improvements in environmental quality indicators as per capita income rises, for example, population of people having access to portable water, as well as a level of sanitation that is considered acceptable (Neumayer and Alstine 2010, 52). Pattern C on the hand, suggests a decline in environmental quality (a rise in global pollutants such CO2 emissions) as income rises (Neumayer 2003, as cited in Neumayer and Alstine 2010, 52). Pattern B is consistent with the hypothesized inverted-U shaped EKC and is associated with “suspended particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxide emissions, fecal and total coliforms and the quality of ambient air found in most EKC studies” (Neumayer and Alstine 2010, 52).
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...e the environment. This ensures that, possessions that the community own today are preserved for future generations to take over, hence promoting sustainable development. In the literature, institutions play a big role creating and enforcing both public and private property rights. Panayotou (1997, 465-484) examines the role of property rights by augmenting the EKC model to include some proxies for institutions. In studying the connection between income and the environment for thirty countries, over the period 1982 to 1994, Panayotou (1997, 468) employed data for sulfur dioxide. Panayotou (1997, 465-484) uses “enforcement of contracts, efficiency of bureaucracy, the efficacy of the rule of law, the extent of government corruption, and the risk of appropriation”, as proxies for quality of institutions. Panayotou (1997, 465) documents that environmental degradation
According to Paying for International Environmental Public Goods, which is written by Rodrigo Arriagada and Charles Perrings, it mainly discusses how to prevent international environmental public goods (IEPG). There are many offset systems within a nation, which are set to prevent public goods. However, there is not an international authority to protect the undersupplied public good. People can gain many benefits from IEPGs, but they don’t have solutions for the problem of undersupply. In this article, Public goods are defined as “pure” only if they are non-exclusive and non-rival in consumption, whereas impure public goods are either partially excludable or rival. It’s impossible for any state to gain these kinds of public goods by itself; its supply depends on worldwide cooperation. However, new networks have changed people’s social participation and the way of exchange ideas. This raises concerns within the ethical liabilities of individuals, organizations, countries and cooperation and the alternative forms of governance of the biosphere. According to the article, “Three common examples of public good supply technologies are ‘additive’, ‘best shot’, and ‘weakest link’ technologies.” The additive technology consists of simple sum and weighted sum public goods. The best shot public goods is benef...
Environmental justice is usually refers to the belief everyone, regardless of their ethnicity or socioeconomic class, should equally share the benefits of environmental luxuries as well as the burdens of environmental health hazards. Environmental Justice is demonstrated using examples of environmental injustice, such as unfair land use practices, environmental regulation being enforced in some areas only, unfair location of harmful industrial facilities and the disposal of toxic waste on communities where most of its population are minorities. Many environmentalist have addressed the issue, for instance the essay “From Carrying Capacity to Footprint, & Back Again,” by Michael Cain reveals that ecological footprint show that people appear to be using resources more rapidly than they can be regenerated and its affecting mainly developing countries.
... income, therefore a time trend was added to the static model. Furthermore, the Engel-Granger test revealed no cointegration between the explanatory variables. This result suggests that a long-term relationship between per capita income and the measures of environmental degradation in the study, do not exist.
Rudel, K. Thomas, J. Timmons Roberts and JoAnn Carmin. 2011. “Political Economy of the Environment.” Annual Review of Sociology 37: 221-238.
In Quan Li’s and Rafael Reuveny’s article Democracy and Environmental Degradation, the authors look at how democracy affects environmental degradation. Li and Reuveny decide to study this aspect of political science because of the small amount of research that has been done and because the conflicting findings in most of the previous studies (Li and Reuveny 935). In this article, they use six dependent variables that in their estimation best represent environmental degradation. The six dependent variables are CO2 emissions per capita, NOx emissions per capita, water pollution, rate of deforestation, area of land that is forested, and severe land degradation. The independent variable, democracy, was measured in two ways. The first was a continuous measurement that measured the democracy as an index. The other way was as a simple dummy variable, where democracy was coded as a 1 and an autocracy was coded 0. On top of this they used a host of control variables. In the study, they found that democracies tend to have less of an effect on environment than autocracies. However,...
Globalisation and environmental sustainability is encapsulated with Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKC) which are commonly used to consider macro-changes in environmental quality resul...
A study by York and Rosa (2003) points out that EMT has insufficiently addressed four fundamental issues: (1) that the institutional modification done by societies in reaction to environmental problems actually lead to ecological improvements; (2) that the late stages of modernizing processes lead to the ecological transformation of production and consumption at relatively high frequency; (3) that industries and firms that reduce their direct impact on the environment are not contributing to the expansion of negative impacts by other industries or firms, and; (4) that as economies become more resource efficient, the pace of increase in their...
GDP growth shows little about the impact of production on the environment and its consequences on living standards. Is our economy, with its mixture of market processes and governmental controls, biased in favour of wasteful and short-sighed exploitation of natural resources? (Nordhaus & Tobin, 1972) Evidence from the World bank’s PM2.5 air pollution indicator shows that over 94% of Ethiopia’s population are exposed to air pollution since 2000 and an increasing trend is realized in subsequent years. Mauritius, on the other hand, records a low rate 0.97% in 2000 which rises to 26.6% in 2013. Calculation of GDP are unlikely to satisfy critics who believe that economic growth per se piles up immense social cost ignored in even the most careful national income calculations (Nordhaus & Tobin, 1972). Though GDP is growing, it excludes its impact on the environment. What then is the importance of growth if it destroys the sustenance of
However, human activity is only concerned with wealth and luxuries of life that actually was threatened environment without their unconscious and/or conscious. This is because, like many development that have been built, it was to generate financial resources that are more secure for the long term period. However, through the development, it is clear that environmental degradation may be affected in resulting a natural resources, as well as its slowly disappearing, which is a major source of economies in Southeast Asia.
1. Pollution - of the air, the water, the soil. For Gadamer all of these problems are the consequence of the compartmentalized thinking of the modern era, along with the assumption that the earth is ours to exploit as we please without regard to for the future, for our children, for the earth itself. We must reassume our historical responsibility for our children’s future by protecting their heritage. The reckless anarchy of the exploitation of the earth must be replaced by responsible dialogue among the exploiters, and among the governments of the earth. At present, we have a gathering of the Big 7 or 8 on how to manage the world to their own advantage. Such a dialogue, however, brings up questions of justice and fairness in the allocation of the resources of the earth. A new protocol must be worked out whereby the universal declaration of human rights is more than a pious wish-list that is lost in the scramble of big corporations to exploit the resources of the earth. Here, Gadamer’s insight into the structure of dialogue can help address these problems.
Chasek, P. S., Downie, D. L., & Brown, J. W. (2014). The Development of Environmental Regimes: Chemicals, Wastes, and Climate Change. In P. S. Chasek, D. L. Downie, & J. W. Brown, Global Environmental Politics (6th ed., pp. 101-173). Boulder: Westview Press.
The environment is a significantly important asset to human. It provides various materials to use, fresh air to breathe, food to eat, water to drink, and energy to use. With more human interactions and activities, we have been harming environments and climates around us. These harmful effects lead to negative consequences to our human. For example, greenhouse gas emissions can lead to an asthma and many other health problems and cause a global warming. This is an example of a negative externality, which is a cost that affects a party who did not choose to incur that cost. Clearly, the greenhouse gas emission represents a negative externality to our economy because people who did not choose to incur the cost of emission but still being affected
Over the past decades, there have been valiant attempts throughout all industries and governance bodies to distinguish how enterprises can establish and become more sustainable. Despite good intentions, a large amount of enterprises have failed to accurately determine the precise strategies to become and maintain a sustainable establishment. Largely underpinning the growing notion of a sustainable enterprise is the principal of sustainable development. Established in the 1980’s, Sustainable Development was developed to promote sustainable living through sustainable production of goods and services, to provide solutions for fulfilling elementary needs to improve the lives of people, now and in the future with least possible environmental impact and the highest possible economic and social yield (Christensen, Thrane, & Herroborg, 2009). Like sustainable development, governance is a concept that was first widely explored and embraced in the late 1980s. Furthermore, like sustainable development it was engaged because it encompassed a broad set of factors that were increasingly important and insufficiently recognised in conventional thinking and because it encouraged a more unified understanding of how these factors were, or should be, linked. Therefore Governance is how one gets to act, through types of environmental-related relations including deliberation, negotiation, self-regulation or authoritative choice and the extent to which actors obey to cooperative decisions (Gibson, 2005). It involves the level and scope of political allocation, the dominant orientation of state, and other institutions and their interactions.
132). Based on that definition, sustainability theorists and philosophers have disagreed about what kinds of moral obligations we might have to future generations. Some advocate for weak sustainability, whereas, others advocate for strong sustainability.‘Weak’ sustainability is fundamentally anthropocentric oriented, with social equity and environmental protection regarded as less than to sustainable economic growth. Often, the focus is on constructing more efficient supplies in economies by including ‘ecosystem services’ into the market. ‘Strong’ sustainability, on the other hand, reverses the order of priority and gives antecedence to ecological scale over economic efficiency. Social equity, is best achieved by restoring ecosystem health, recognizing ecological tipping points and cultivating system resilience. New economic indicators of wellbeing and quality of life are advocated and market based solutions that impose monetary values on life and “ecosystem services” are rejected on moral grounds. The key idea of ‘weak’ sustainability suggests that natural capital and other types of capitals are perfectly substitutable. The key idea of ‘strong’ sustainability is that, the substitutability of natural capital by other types
Extractive institutions are used throughout this book to explain that the upper class extracts resources and goods from the lower class. They don’t allow growth or competition, but rather they just exploit the rest of society into doing their labour. It’s used to please a few, rather than the majority, and can still be seen in most places in the world. Whereas, inclusive institutions are the ideal way nations should be run, allowing for fair economical systems, property ownership, educational facilities and allowing all citizens to participate in the growth of the economy. Acemoglu and Robinson argue that this is the main factor in distinguishing the rich countries from the poor and, moreover, how they treat their citizens. This system is relatively used in North America and Western Europe.