Does income inequality harm the environment?: Empirical evidence from the United States

The environmental Kuznets curve and CO2 emissions in the USA

“…case has focused on the study at the sub-national level, in which the empirical evidence suggests that the estimated pollution-income relationships vary across states; this lends support to our premise that differences in consumer preferences matter in the empirical analyses of the EKC (Aldy 2005;Plassmann and Khanna 2006;Carson 2010;Baek andGweisah 2013 or Burnett et al 2013). Hence, despite several approaches that have attempted to achieve consensus on the existence of EKC in the USA, it appears that multiple approaches have done nothing but highlight the complexity of conclusive results for this purpose.…”

Mechanisms explaining the impact of economic inequality on environmental deterioration

“…The authors suggest a recursive 16 These variables can be classified into four types, with the first three applying to all of the types of endogenous variables. The categories include: biophysical and demographic pressures: urbanisation (Jun et al, 2011), population density (Scruggs, 1998;Torras and Boyce, 1998), population (Mikkelson et al, 2007;Pandit and Laband, 2009); human capital, level of information and technology: number of years of education for each inhabitant (Jun et al, 2011), number of newspapers sold annually (Bimonte, 2002), R&D/GDP spending (Jun et al, 2011); indicators for level of freedom and concentration of power (Clément and Meunié, 2010a,b;Torras and Boyce, 1998;Torras et al, 2011); specific influences on particular variables: measures of biodiversity to explain the pressures faced at this level (Mikkelson et al, 2007, Holland et al, 2009Pandit and Laband, 2009), energy consumption explaining CO 2 emissions (Baek and Gweisah, 2013), industrial output explaining industrial pollutant waste (Jun et al, 2011), type of geographic area (Torras and Boyce, 1998) explaining air pollution, green R&D explaining number of green technology patents (Vona and Patriarca, 2011). 17 We note one study of soil depletion.…”

Income inequality, innovation and carbon emission: Perspectives on sustainable growth

“…Golley and Meng (2012) have further found that a household with a high income causes more emission than a low-income household. Moreover, Baek and Gweisah (2013) have used time series data and the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model and examined that impartial income distribution can improve environmental quality both in the short and long run.…”