Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the best method for reducing the rate of deforestation in developing coun-
tries. They also said that deforestation was the problem of market failure,
which resulted from the lack of dei ning and enforcing property rights,
where people had no right in land ownership, and therefore no incentive
to make ei cient decisions in the use of land.
Antle and Heidebrink (1995) examined the relationship between income
and two classes of environmental amenities: parklands and forests in low-
and high-income countries. The environmental indicators used were total
area of parks and protected areas (PARKS), deforestation (DEFOR),
af orestation (AFFOR) and total forest area (FOR). They gathered their
income data and area values from the
World Development Report 1987
,
PARKS data from the
1989/90 Environmental Data Report
by the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and FOR and DEFOR data
from
World Resources 1990/91
. The income data used were per capita
GNP in 1985 nominal US dollars. They found a U-shaped relationship
and the income elasticity of demand for environmental quality was near
zero for countries with income per capita of around $1200-$2000, while
being positive and generally exceeding unity for countries with higher per
capita income levels.
However, in an empirical study done by Koop and Tole (1999) in
which they examined the relationship between deforestation and per
capita GDP, using less restrictive model specii cations, they did not i nd
an EKC relationship between the two variables. They used data for 76
tropical developing countries for various years during the period 1961-92.
The deforestation indicator used was the loss in forest cover derived
from the
FAO Production Yearbook
. The per capita GDP data were
taken from the Penn World Table. Also they included two demographic
measures; the population density and population change, which were
derived from the
FAO Production Yearbook
and the Penn World Table.
The authors concluded that the extreme assumptions used in previous
studies that assumed uniformity across the countries led to the existence
of the EKC pattern between deforestation and per capita income. Upon
adopting random coei cient specii cations, as they did in their study,
the inverted U-shaped relationship did not exist. They added that their
approach was more realistic given the wide variety of physical and social
characteristics across the countries.
With respect to urban environmental quality, a large number of studies
concentrated on air pollution. Selden and Song (1994) carried out an
empirical study using a cross-national panel of data on aggregate emis-
sions to examine the relationship between pollution and economic devel-
opment. They used aggregate emissions instead of urban air quality data
as they believed that the latter was valid if the objective was to understand
