A cointegrating polynomial regression analysis of the material kuznets curve hypothesis

This paper investigates the Material Kuznets Curve (MKC) hypothesis, postulating an inverted U-shaped relationship between a country's level of economic development and its intensity of material use, by means of nonlinear cointegration analysis. We use consumption data for aluminum, lead and zinc for eight OECD countries spanning from 1900 to 2006 and employ the tests and estimation techniques for nonlinear cointegration developed by Saikkonen and Choi (2004), Wagner (2013) as well as Wagner and Hong (2016). We find evidence for the prevalence of a cointegrating quadratic MKC for about half of the country-metal pairs.