ABSTRACT
As argued in Chapter 5 our contention is that ‘the applicability of the notion of sustainability has ultimately got to be universal and refer to the indefinite future’ and must be related to consumption. Further as Jha and Whalley (2001) have argued, the notion of what constitutes environmental degradation varies between developed and developing countries. The EKC literature has, by and large, focused primarily on emissions since these are the most important concern for developed countries whereas developing countries may be more concerned about land degradation. Any comprehensive view on the links between environmental degradation and economic development must then study (an appropriately weighted) aggregate of relevant environmental degraders. Furthermore, Jha and Whalley (2001) argue, the EKC for any given country is tenuous, at best. In addition, there has been little effort in the extant literature to relate PCI (or some other broad measure of economic development) to a composite index of environmental degradation in a cross section of countries. In Chapter 6 we report estimates of a GEKC, for 174 countries using a more complete measure of economic development than PCI – the HDI ranks of countries – and relate these to a composite measure of the levels of environmental degradation (encapsulated in a composite in EDI) for these countries. We establish that this GEKC assumes a cubic form with developed countries contributing the lion’s share of GED.
