Analysis of the Relationship Between Pollution and GDP in Selected OECD and OPEC Countries: A New Approach

Document Type : Original Articles

Authors

1 Assistant Professor, National Research Institute of Science Policy, Tehran, Iran.

2 Ph.D. Student in Economics, Faculty of Economics, Tehran University, Iran.

Abstract

The analysis of income effect on environmental quality has been an important debate in the 1990. Several papers have used different approaches for an analysis of the relationship between income and environmental quality. Also, many of these papers have employed different measures of pollutants and income. The U inverse relationship between income and the level of pollution has been confirmed in many papers. In this paper, the relationship between pollution and income has been extracted by means of their microeconomic foundations. The U inverse relationship between the pollution generation (CO2) and GDP per unit of energy use has been tested for selected OECD and OPEC countries in 1980-2003 and 1985-2003. The results of this paper show that the economic structure of the group of countries selected and the period of time had a major role to play in rejection or acceptance of the Environmental Kuznet’s Curve hypothesis. Also, the elasticity of the problem of pollution and GDP per unit of energy use for selected OPEC countries is almost two times that of the OECD countries.

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