Analysis of the Relationship Between Agriculture, Economic Growth, and the Environment Through Keynesian Models - The Agricultural Economics of the 21st Century - page 103

ecological footprint. This is one of the greatest challenges for the future, namely for
our governments, in order to promote a sustainable economic growth.
So, in this context this study functions as a healthy contribution towards inter-
national scientific research, by considering economic contexts (Portugal) seldom
explored by the research community at the level of the relationship between
economic growth and the environment and considering a background theory,
which to our knowledge has never been used, in these issues, such as the Keynesian
theory.
2 Literature Review
The relationship between the economic growth of countries and regions and the
environment has been studied by many authors, specifically those for the environ-
mental Kuznets curve, others with the endogenous theory, and others which utilize
alternative approaches.
For example, for Korea, Baek and Kim ( 2013 ), using dynamic co-integration
approaches, and considering the environmental Kuznets curve, found dependency
of environmental performance from economic growth. These authors conclude, for
the period from the 1970s to 2007, in a time series framework, that economic
growth had a positive effect on the environment and that nuclear energy had a
favorable influence on the environment, whereas the use of fossil fuels in both the
production of electricity and energy consumption had a negative impact on the
quality of the environment. They used variables as the dynamics of income mea-
sured by the GDP per capita, energy consumption (energy use per capita), electric-
ity production (conventional thermal—for example, coal, natural gas, oil—and
nuclear sources), and quality of the environment (CO 2 emissions).
Bartz and Kelly ( 2008 ) found similar conclusions for the USA. These authors
performed tests with time series data based on the environmental Kuznets curve,
from diverse periods, for the USA, considering five different pollutants, and found
that the results whilst mixed were consistent with the predictions from Kuznets
theory.
By also considering the environmental Kuznets curve, with panel data, from
1990 to 2003, for 90 developed and developing countries, Kleemann and Abdulai
( 2013 ) analyzed the relationship between economic growth, international trade, and
quality of the environment. They considered variables related with environmental
quality [consumption of chlorofluorocarbons in kilograms per capita, emissions of
organic water pollutants in tons per day, energy use in tons of oil equivalent per
capita, adjusted net savings in percentage of gross national income, international
trade intensity (trade as a percentage of GDP, applied tariff rate, weighted mean of
all products), the GDP, and population density]. The “adjusted net savings in
percentage of gross national income” was considered to be a sustainability indica-
tor. The results support that the relationship between economic growth, interna-
tional trade, and environmental quality depends upon income levels and geographic