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main cause of the environmental degradation and now is seen as a “savior” of the environment has spurred the interest of policy designers. Instead of hampering the growth of the economy, measures that make economy to grow even faster is what needs.

 

Environmental Kuznets Curve

 

Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) is the relationship that is assumed to trace the pollution path followed by countries as their per capita gross domestic product (GDP) grows and describes the relationship between per capita income and of environmental degradation indicators (Unruth and Moomaw, 1998). In the infant stages of development, the levels of some pollutants climb with increases in per capita income, while at advanced levels of development, environmental degradation follows a downward trend as income per capita is moving upwards. These results give rise to a bell shaped curve relating economic growth to environmental degradation, redolent of the relationship hypothesized by Kuznets (1995) between economic and income inequality (Nahman and Antrobus, 2005). The concept of EKC came from the early 1990s with Grossman and Krueger’s (1991) path-breaking study of the potential impacts of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement).

 

Origins of the EKC

 

The environmental Kuznets curve consists of a hypothesized relationship between different indicators of environmental degradation and income per capita. At first stage of economic growth, degradation and pollution increase, but further than some level of income per capita, the movement shift, that is for substantial high income of the country it leads to higher levels of economic growth leading to environmental improvement. This means that the impact of environmental indicator is an inverted U shape function of real income per capita (Stern, 2004)

 

In other words, the distribution of income becomes more asymmetrical in early stage of income growth and then the distribution moves towards greater equality as economic growth continues (Kuznets, 1955). This liaison between income per capita and income inequality can be represented by a bell-shaped curve. This is viewed as an empirical phenomenon known as the Kuznets Curve (Dinda, 2004).

 

Criticism and drawbacks of the Kuznets Curve

 

The Kuznets Curve has helped in studying the relationship between environmental pollutants and GDP of countries, but it does have drawbacks too. Even Kuznets (1955) himself indicated that the Kuznets Curve Theory is not a perfect one and the relationship between income inequality and economic development cannot be assumed. He also declared that lot information in the paper has been speculated and thus further research work must be carried out.

 

The reason behind the development of the Environmental Kuznets Curve

 

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