1. The Political Economy of the Carbon Kuznets Curve.
- Author
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Sprinz, Detlef F. and Aklin, Michaël
- Subjects
- *
CLIMATE change , *POLITICAL economic analysis , *GREENHOUSE gas mitigation , *AIR pollution prevention , *ENVIRONMENTAL health - Abstract
While the future of whether and how to globally govern climate change has been left in limbo in the aftermath of the December 2009 and 2010 conferences of national governments in Copenhagen and Cancun, the overarching challenge remains whether a transition to low-carbon economies - and principally a massive decline in all greenhouse gases - is possible. This article makes a range of contributions. First, by building on existing studies regarding the link between democracy and environmental performance, it clarifies the long-term impact in the context of per capita carbon emissions. Second, it demonstrates that democracy as well as political capacity each have political effects on carbon emissions, and that the configuration of these two factors differs across various levels of per capita income. Most interesting are the different patterns of interactive effects of different levels of wealth via both democracy and state capacity on carbon emissions. Third, we employ a time series of nearly half a century of observations for more than 100 countries, thereby overcoming a range of shortcomings associated with cross-sectional analyses and much shorter time-series analyses of only the last one to two decades. And fourth, by employing an error correction model, we innovate methodologically by focusing on the short-and long-term effects of our variables of interest on the long-term carbon trajectory. Our focus throughout the article is on the long-term effects of political variables. In combination, we offer a political extension of the proposition of an environmental Kuznets curve for the case of carbon emissions and test it empirically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2011