This paper chronicles the story of the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC). The EKC proposes that indicators of environmental degradation first rise, and then fall with increasing income per capita. However, recent evidence shows that developing countries are addressing environmental issues, sometimes adopting developed country standards with a short time lag and sometimes performing better than some wealthy countries, and that the EKC results have a very flimsy statistical foundation. A new generation of decomposition models can help disentangle the true relations between development and the environment.

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The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis proposes that there is an inverted U-shape relation between environmental degradation and income per capita. Various explanations for this phenomenon have been put forward and some authors argue that important explanatory variables are omitted from conventional EKC estimates. Inclusion of these omitted variables is argued to increase the estimated "turning point" -the level of GDP per capita above which environmental degradation is declining. In this paper we use a new cross-section/time-series data base of sulfur emissions for a wide range of developed and developing countries. The methodology involves estimating EKCs for subsets of this database as well as for the sample as a whole. The results show that estimating an EKC using data for only the OECD countries, as has often been the case, leads to estimates where the turning point is at a much lower level than when the EKC is estimated using data for the World as a whole. The paper explores possible explanations of these results using Monte Carlo analysis, and other statistical tests.We conclude that the simple EKC model is fundamentally misspecified and that there are omitted variables which are correlated with GDP.

9601 David Stern. Progress on the environmental Kuznets curve? 9701 Michael Young. Water rights: an ecological economics perspective. 9702 David Stern and Robert Kaufmann. Time series properties of global climate variables: detection and attribution of climate change. 9703 Ken Menz and Katie Ellis. Fire as an economic disincentive to smallholder rubber planting in Imperata areas. 9704 Roger Attwater. Property entitlements and land reform in upland Thai catchments. 9705 Mick Common, Tim Bull, and Natalie Stoeckl. The travel cost method: an empirical investigation of Randall's difficulty. 9706 Colin Hunt. Economic instruments for environmental and natural resource conservation and management in the South Pacific. 9707 David Alden. Recreational user management of parks: an ecological economic framework. 9708 David Stern and Robert Kaufmann. Is there a global warming signal in hemispheric temperature series? 9801 Daniel McKenney. Resource economists should do more cost analysis and less benefit analysis. 9802 Roy Darwin. FARM: A global framework for integrated land use/cover modeling.9803 David Stern. A multivariate cointegration analysis of the role of energy in the U.S. macroeconomy. Abstract This paper extends my previous analysis of the causal relationship of GDP and energy use in the USA in the post-war period to a cointegration analysis of that relationship. It is found that the majority of the relevant variables are integrated justifying a cointegration analysis. The results show that cointegration does occur and that energy input cannot be excluded from the cointegration space. The results are plausible in terms of macroeconomic dynamics. The results are similar to my previous Granger Causality results and contradict claims in the literature (based on bivariate models) that there is no cointegration between energy and output. Abosedra S. and H. Baghestani (1991) New evidence on the causal relationship between United States energy consumption and gross national product, Journal of Energy and Development 14, 285-292. Akaike H. (1973) Information theory and an extension of the maximum likelihood principle, in B. N. Petrov and F. Csaki (eds.) 2nd International Symposium on Information Theory, Budapest, Akademini Kiado, 267-281. Akarca A. and T. Long (1980) On the relationship between energy and GNP: A reexamination,

The public health and economic consequences of Plasmodium falciparum malaria are once again regarded as priorities for global development. There has been much speculation on whether anthropogenic climate change is exacerbating the malaria problem, especially in areas of high altitude where P. falciparum transmission is limited by low temperature. The International Panel on Climate Change has concluded that there is likely to be a net extension in the distribution of malaria and an increase in incidence within this range. We investigated long-term meteorological trends in four high-altitude sites in East Africa, where increases in malaria have been reported in the past two decades. Here we show that temperature, rainfall, vapour pressure and the number of months suitable for P. falciparum transmission have not changed significantly during the past century or during the period of reported malaria resurgence. A high degree of temporal and spatial variation in the climate of East Africa suggests further that claimed associations between local malaria resurgences and regional changes in climate are overly simplistic.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis -an inverted U-shape relation between various indicators of environmental degradation and income per capitahas become one of the 'stylised facts' of environmental and resource economics. This is despite considerable criticism on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Cointegration analysis can be used to test the validity of such stylised facts when the data involved contain stochastic trends. In the present paper, we use cointegration analysis to test the EKC hypothesis using a panel dataset of sulfur emissions and GDP data for 74 countries over a span of 31 years. We find that the data is stochastically trending in the time-series dimension. Given this, and interpreting the EKC as a long run equilibrium relationship, support for the hypothesis requires that an appropriate model cointegrates and that sulfur emissions are a concave function of income. Individual and panel cointegration tests cast doubt on the general applicability of the hypothesised relationship. Even when we find cointegration, many of the relationships for individual countries are not concave. The results show that the EKC is a problematic concept, at least in the case of sulfur emissions.

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