Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
pollutants as a result of higher per capita income. The air and water pol-
lutants examined were sulphur dioxide, smoke, heavy particles, dissolved
oxygen, faecal coliform, access to safe water and access to sanitation. For
the i rst i ve pollutants, they used data from the GEMS for the period
1977 to 1991. The air pollution data contained observations from 19 to
42 countries and that for water pollution contained observations from 58
countries. The percentages of population with safe water and sanitation
were obtained from the United Nations Development Programme (1994)
and were national-level variables with no time series dimension. The per
capita income used were measured in real PPP adjusted for 1985 US
dollars. The income data for per capita GDP were taken from Summers
and Heston (1991), while the national income levels data were taken from
the UNDP (1994).
The authors predicted that the higher the power inequality, the higher
the levels of pollution, so they included other variables as proxies for
power inequality, such as Gini ratio of income inequality, literacy rates
and political rights and civil liberties. Four of the seven environmental
indicators showed EKC patterns when excluding the power inequality
variable. These indicators were sulphur dioxide, smoke, access to safe
water and access to sanitation with turning points of $3890, $4350, $11 255
and $10 957, respectively. Heavy particles monotonically decreased with
rising income while dissolved oxygen and faecal coliform monotonically
increased. When including the power equality variable, only three pol-
lutants showed EKC patterns, which were sulphur dioxide, dissolved
oxygen and access to safe water with turning points of $3360, $19 865 and
$6900, respectively. Access to sanitation increased monotonically, while
the relationships for smoke, heavy particles and faecal coliform were sta-
tistically insignii cant. They arrived at two main conclusions. First, equi-
table distribution of power, in the form of equitable income distribution,
wider literacy and greater political liberties and civil rights, would lead to
better environmental quality, especially in low-income nations. Second,
improvements in environmental quality would not automatically accom-
pany continued growth in per capita income.
Also, Deacon (1999) argued that the form of government in a country
played a crucial role in the way economic growth would af ect the envi-
ronment and that omitting it as a determinant of environmental quality
could lead to biased results and interpretation. He presented a study to
examine the ef ect of the government regime on the provision of envi-
ronmental public goods and environmental policies using cross-sectional
analysis of 118 countries. Deacon classii ed governments into groups with
similar political attributes using compiled data sets from two sources. The
i rst was the Cross-national Time-series Data Archive, which was i rst
