The environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis is a theory by which the relationship between per capita GDP and per capita pollutant emissions has an inverted U shape. This implies that, past a certain point, economic growth may actually be profitable for environmental quality. Most studies on this subject are based on estimating fully parametric quadratic or cubic regression models. While this is not technically wrong, such an approach somewhat lacks flexibility since it may fail to detect the true shape of the relationship if it happens not to be of the specified form. We use semiparametric and flexible nonlinear parametric modelling methods in an attempt to provide more robust inferences. We find little evidence in favour of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis. Our main results could be interpreted as indicating that the oil shock of the 1970s has had an important impact on progress towards less polluting technology and production.

The economic literature has been investigating the positive relation between public infrastructure spending and the productivity of the private sector since Munnell (1992). We have introduced this relationship into a recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium model of the Quebec economy to investigate various funding schemes to scale up infrastructure spending in the province. We draw our assumptions from Estache et al. (2010) combined with sectoral elasticity parameters. We conduct a comparative analysis where the funding comes from debt alone, and debt with sales tax, income tax and business tax. Our main finding is that the income tax seems to produce the most positive effects and the businesses tax the most negative effects, though differences are small.

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In this article we show that the Gini coefficient is simultaneously decomposable both by sources of income and by populations of income receivers for non-overlapping income distributions: the so-called first-best Gini multi-decomposition. We show that this multidimensional decomposition is useful for many reasons: (i) it is related to the degree of inequality aversion of the decision maker, (ii) it is especially well suited to study inequalities between poor and non-poor people, (iii) it enables one to measure the impact of marginal tax reforms on within-and between-group, respectively.