Desperately seeking environmental Kuznets

The number of studies seeking to characterize empirically the reduced-form relationship between country economic growth and the quantity of various pollutants produced has recently increased significantly. In several cases researchers have found evidence in favor of an inverted-U 'environmental Kuznets' curve. In the case of a major greenhouse gas, CO2, however, the evidence is at best mixed. This paper sheds further light on this issue by using a newly developed data set covering over one hundred countries around the world for the last twenty-five years. Alternative functional forms and a rigorous discrimination among competing alternatives are examined.