Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
emissions and per capita income followed an inverted U-shaped pattern.
For instance, the turning point for the United States was $10 000 GDP per
capita. In other words, per capita CO
2
emissions increased, then l attened
and then reduced at higher levels of economic development.
Similar results to those of Schmalensee et al. were found in a study by
Panayotou et al. (1999). They studied the relationship between per capita
income and CO
2
emissions using panel national data with 3869 observa-
tions for 127 countries, with populations over 1 million, for the period
1960 to 1992. The sample accounted for approximately 95 per cent of the
world's population and 90 per cent of the global CO
2
emissions from fossil
fuels. The GDP data were obtained from the Penn World Table (1992) and
were in 1985 US dollars purchasing power parity. The CO
2
data were taken
from Marland et al. (1999). They found evidence of an inverted U-shaped
relationship between per capita income and per capita CO
2
emissions, with
a turning point of $12 000. They also found that the highest additions to
CO
2
emissions were for income levels in the range of $1500 to $4000.
In a study by Ravallion et al. (1997), they found that CO
2
emissions and
per capita GDP followed an inverted U-shaped pattern. They studied the
relationship between per capita GDP and carbon emissions for 42 coun-
tries using the data from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The data on
fuel use were obtained from the United Nations statistical division, where
the Marland and Rotty (1984) method was applied in order to convert
fuel consumption and cement manufacturing into carbon emissions. The
per capita GDP data used were in PPP-adjusted values based on 1985 US
dollars. They found that at low average income levels, carbon emissions
tended to increase, but then the relationship l attened out at middle- to
high-income levels and reversed at high levels of income. The authors
also found that at higher income inequality, there was a sizeable positive
impact on the aggregate income elasticity of carbon emissions, which
indicated that both average levels of income and inequality had ef ects on
carbon emissions.
Also Galeotti and Lanza (1999) attempted to shed further light on
the issue of the greenhouse gas CO
2
, using data covering 108 countries
around the world over the period 1971 to 1995, using new functional
forms developed by the International Energy Agency (IEA). In 1995, the
108 countries accounted for 88 per cent of the CO
2
emissions generated by
fuel combustion. Their sample consisted of 2700 annual observations, of
which 700 observations were from 28 OECD countries and 2000 observa-
tions were from 80 non-OECD countries. In addition to analysing the
108 countries in the sample, they also analysed the sub-samples of OECD
and non-OECD countries in order to account for the dif erent stages
of economic development, technological position and other structural
