Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
with its high pollution, especially in the early stages, to the less pollut-
ing service industries. One of the reasons for this pattern could be that
wealthier countries dumped their polluting processes in poorer countries.
This, in turn, meant that it was not possible for all nations to experience
improvements in environmental quality. The second reason they gave was
that the EKC might be based on two separate relationships. First was the
'scale ef ect', where higher economic activity generated more pollution
and wealthy countries, with more polluting activity, generated more pollu-
tion. This was referred to as pollution activity. Second was the 'technique
ef ect', where citizens in wealthy countries demanded more environmental
quality in the form of regulations to protect the environment and to reduce
the amount of pollution per unit of activity. This was referred to as pollu-
tion intensity. Therefore, the shape of the pollution-income relationship
was the product of pollution activity and pollution intensity. So their con-
clusion was that polluting activity increased with income, while polluting
intensity decreased with income and the product of the two followed an
inverse U-shape.
Midlarsky (1998) examined the relationship between democracy and
the environment. He used six environmental indicators as the dependent
variables: CO
2
emissions, deforestation, soil erosion by water, land area
protection, freshwater availability and soil erosion by chemicals. He found
that democratic countries had higher CO
2
emissions, deforestation and
soil erosion. However, they tended to protect a higher percentage of their
land area. For the last two environmental indicators he found no signii -
cant relationship and concluded that there was no uniform relationship
between democracy and the environment.
Tuan (1999) found similar results for CO
2
emissions to those found by
Panayotou for SO
2
. He presented a paper on the relationship between
income and environmental quality, mainly CO
2
emissions. He used panel
data for six countries at dif erent stages of economic development. The
countries examined were Vietnam, Thailand, Korea, France, Japan and
the United States. In addition to the income variable, he included in his
model other social variables, such as population, economic growth and
institutional capacity in order to examine the underlying impacts on the
EKC trajectory. The environmental data for the three developed coun-
tries were obtained from the OECD Environmental Data Compendium
for the years 1993, 1995 and 1997. The energy data for the three Asian
countries were obtained from the ENERDATA database. The per capita
GDP data were in 1987 constant US dollars and were obtained from
the database of ENERDATA as well as the data on economic growth
rates and demographic density. For the political or institutional capacity
variable, the author used four indicators from the Business Environmental
