Questioning the empirical basis of the environmental Kuznets curve for CO2 New evidence from a panel stationarity test robust to multiple breaks and cross-dependence》.pdf

E C O L O G I C A L E C O N O M I C S 6 4 ( 2 0 0 8 ) 5 5 9 – 5 7 4 ava i l a b l e a t w w w. s c i e n c e d i r e c t . c o m w w w. e l s ev i e r. c o m / l o c a t e / e c o l e c o n ANALYSIS Questioning the empirical basis of the environmental Kuznets curve for CO2: New evidence from a panel stationarity test robust to multiple breaks and cross-dependence Diego Romero-Ávila⁎ Pablo de Olavide University, Department of Economics, Carretera de Utrera, Km. 1, 41013 Seville, Spain A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T Article history: This paper investigates the time series properties of per capita CO2 emissions and per capita Received 23 October 2006 GDP levels for a sample of 86 countries over the period 1960–2000. For that purpose, we Received in revised form employ a state-of-the-art panel stationarity test which incorporates multiple shifts in level 7 February 2007 and slope, thereby controlling for cross-sectional dependence through bootstrap methods. Accepted 11 March 2007 Our analysis renders clear-cut evidence that per capita GDP levels are nonstationary for the Available online 2 May 2007 world as a whole while per capita CO2 is found to be regime-wise trend stationary. The analysis of country-groups shows that for Africa and Asia, per capita CO2 is best described as Keywords: nonstationary, while per capita GDP appears stationary around a broken trend. In addition, Panel Stationarity Test