• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.10 no.4
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• pp.619-632
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• 2001

The purpose of this study is to test the Kuznets Hypothesis on the relationship between environmental pollution and economic growth by using the panel data. The major results of the study can be summarized threefold as follows. First, previous studies can pose the risk of spurious regression because of the nature of non-stationery of the data used. Second, the result of the co-integration test indicates that the emission of $CO_2$ and per capita income are co-integrated. Finally, according to the results of OLS and DOLS estimation, the turning point in this study is set in far higher level of per capita income compared with those in previous studies.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.667-688
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• 2014

This research tested the EKC (Environment Kuznets Curve) Hypothesis using the $CO_2$ Emissions by region and GRDP. We built the panel data set on the 15 local government region from 1990 to 2010 for this analysis. GRDP, population and total factor productivity was considered as the factors influencing on the regional $CO_2$ Emissions. Analysis method in this research is panel GLS model as Lantz and Feng (2006). The results show that the EKC hypothesis did not hold in Korea but there is inverted U relationship between the $CO_2$ Emissions and total factor productivity. As the total factor productivity grows, the $CO_2$ increased but decreased after a certain level.

• Korea Trade Review
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.51-67
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• 2017

This study analyzes the relationship between globalization and income inequality. The empirical model is developed based on Kuznets' hypothesis of the inverse U curve. The effects of factor abundancy and globalization which is characterized by trade and FDI on income inequality are analyzed. 127 member countries of WTO are classified into 4 groups according to GNI. The period of analysis is 21 years from 1995 to 2015. Results show that 3 groups of countries excluding one group that is high income countries supports Kuznets' hypothesis which is the inverse U curve. Secondly, expansion of trade decreases income inequality of middle income countries but increases high and low income countries. Thirdly, FDI increases income inequality of middle and low income countries. Finally, the increase in capital abundancy lowers income inequality because the capital accumulation increases the productivity of labor.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.515-529
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• 2003

This theoretical model makes three contributions to the study on economic growth and environment. First, emissions are generated during final goods production and technology accumulation. Second, this paper assumes that pollution is directly increasing with increase in final goods output or in consumption. Third, we use reproducible factors associated with labor and capital input in production function and assume constant return to scale in reproducible factors. From growth rate condition we derived, increases in reproducible factors, increases in productivity of either the abatment or technology sector, and decrease in social discount rate would increase the sustainable growth rate. In empirical test, the environmental degradation did not effect the economic growth rate though other factors satisfied the growth rate condition equation. However, through the reinterpretation of this result, we found indirectly the fact of that an inverted U relationship between air pollution and economic growth rate would exist in 20 OECD countries using a panel data for the period of 1986~1995.

• Journal of Environmental Policy
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.71-91
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• 2011

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the environmental performance of 29 Chinese provinces by adopting the advanced measurements, integrated pollution intensity index, IPI, which can be computed using Data Envelopment Analysis(DEA) techniques. This index has the advantage of accounting for multiple resources used, good outputs produced and pollutants emitted simultaneously. The result obtained using the methodology shows the obvious evidence that provinces located around eastern area of China take relatively low levels and these phenomenons have been clearly observed throughout the sample period 1998~2007. The estimated index can be interpreted that the environmental burden in China has been steadily decreased as economic growth. This paper also tries to figure out the relationship among IPI, income levels, economic structures, the level of environmental regulations and FDI inflow. The estimated relationship between IPI and income per capita predicts improving environmental performance with increasing income levels. This explains the improvement in IPI which is simultaneously observed with income increases. According to the 'pollution haven hypothesis', many researches have been concerned the possibility that a large amount of foreign capital has been invested in China to avoid the strict environmental standards in advanced countries. However, the estimated coefficients in all model specifications take negative sign with IPI and highly statistical significant. This is a indication that there are positive impacts of foreign investments on IPI by adopting clean and high technologies from advanced countries.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.21 no.2
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• pp.271-299
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• 2012

The relationship between environment and economic growth has been controversial for a long time. The cores of controversy are endogeneity problem and omitted variable bias. This paper tests EKC (Environmental Kuznets Curves) hypothesis by considering econometric issues and estimates the effects of energy mix on $CO_2$ emissions empirically and tests with time series during 1981~2008. By the results of this analysis, we convince EKC Hypothesis which the relationship between $CO_2$ emissions and economic growth is the inverted U-shaped and the national energy mix contributes significantly to GHG mitigation. We also find that the nuclear energy has the greatest contribution for $CO_2$ mitigation and the renewable energy does not seem to contribute little to the $CO_2$ mitigation because the proportion of renewable energy in Korea is negligible. In terms of final energy consumption, $CO_2$ increases and transportation sector is statistically and significantly associated.

• Environmental and Resource Economics Review
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.875-896
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• 2010

Using the difference in differences (DID) estimation method, this paper analyzes the effect of European Union's Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) on the reduction of per capita $CO_2$ emission among the twenty five participating countries. For this, the panel dataset of forty two European countries for the period 1990~2007 is constructed. Special attention is paid to the bias of the standard errors in the DID estimation due to the presence of serial correlation in the error terms. The results shows quite a robust effect of EU ETS on the reduction of per capita $CO_2$ emission among the participating countries regardless of the calculation methods of standard errors. The results also shows that the increased implicit tax rate on energy has a robust effect on the reduction of per capita $CO_2$ emission. On the contrary, the estimation results regarding the effects of per capita GDP and population density on the per capita $CO_2$ emission seem inconsistent. In particular, the environmental Kuznets curve is not statistically supported with the use of robust standard errors.