Abstract
Andreoni and Levinson’s (J Public Econ 80:269–286, 2001) EKC model is modified to include Stone (Econ J 63:511–527, 1954) and Geary (Rev Econ Stud 18(99):65–66, 1950) preferences where the economic agent has a minimum consumption requirement (MCR). We show that at each level of income, an increase in the MCR is associated with higher levels of pollution, and the threshold level of income at which the EKC inverts changes with a change in the MCR. A numerical exercise further supports these findings. We offer a policy discussion within the context of the environmental impacts of meeting a MCR noting that doing so is costly in terms of the impact on pollution and the resources required to mitigate pollution in its presence.
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Notes
See Jeffords and Shah (2013) for more on the connection between minimum consumption requirements and economic and social rights, in particular, the human right to water as set within a classic nonrenewable resource model inclusive of a backstop technology.
In a previous iteration of this paper, we estimated a one-period lagged cross-sectional country-level EKC using purchasing-power-parity adjusted per capita consumption from the World Bank Global Consumption Database as a proxy for the minimum consumption requirement. Based on a sample of 89 countries and differentiating the consumption amounts by sector (e.g., rural vs. urban), the results supported the theoretical and numerical findings but with many caveats and data limitations. Nonetheless, these results and the corresponding discussion are available upon request.
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Jeffords, C., Thompson, A. The human rights foundations of an EKC with a minimum consumption requirement: theory, implications, and quantitative findings. Lett Spat Resour Sci 12, 41–49 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12076-019-00225-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12076-019-00225-1