IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecolec/v146y2018icp184-192.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Great Recession, the Treadmill of Production and Ecological Disorganization: Did the Recession Decrease Toxic Releases Across US States, 2005–2014?

Author

Listed:
  • Long, Michael A.
  • Lynch, Michael J.
  • Stretesky, Paul B.

Abstract

The treadmill of production, ecological Marxist, steady-state economics and the natural science literatures suggest that economic growth and pollution are linked. We use the economic downturn resulting from the Great Recession in 2008–2009 as a natural experiment to test this hypothesis. Specifically, we examine the effect of the Great Recession on pollution measured by the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) using maps and fixed-effects regression models for US states for the period 2005–2014. Multivariate time-series analysis demonstrates that even when adjusting for controls there is a unique and negative effect of the recession on TRI levels. We situate our findings in the relevant literature, suggest possibilities for what the recession effect may be capturing, and discuss some implications of increased pollution levels.

Suggested Citation

  • Long, Michael A. & Lynch, Michael J. & Stretesky, Paul B., 2018. "The Great Recession, the Treadmill of Production and Ecological Disorganization: Did the Recession Decrease Toxic Releases Across US States, 2005–2014?," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 146(C), pages 184-192.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:146:y:2018:i:c:p:184-192
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.10.022
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180091731145X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2017.10.022?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Robert Costanza & Gar Alperovitz & Herman Daly & Joshua Farley & Carol Franco & Tim Jackson & Ida Kubiszewski & Juliet Schor & Peter Victor, 2014. "What Would a Sustainable and Desirable Economy-in-Society-in-Nature Look Like?," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Robert Costanza & Ida Kubiszewski (ed.), Creating a Sustainable and Desirable Insights from 45 global thought leaders, chapter 5, pages 33-49, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    2. Christopher J. Erceg & Andrew T. Levin, 2014. "Labor Force Participation and Monetary Policy in the Wake of the Great Recession," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 46(S2), pages 3-49, October.
    3. John G. Fernald, 2015. "Productivity and Potential Output before, during, and after the Great Recession," NBER Macroeconomics Annual, University of Chicago Press, vol. 29(1), pages 1-51.
    4. Wackernagel, Mathis & Rees, William E., 1997. "Perceptual and structural barriers to investing in natural capital: Economics from an ecological footprint perspective," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(1), pages 3-24, January.
    5. Bruce D. Meyer & James X. Sullivan, 2013. "Consumption and Income Inequality and the Great Recession," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 103(3), pages 178-183, May.
    6. Bagliano, Fabio C. & Morana, Claudio, 2012. "The Great Recession: US dynamics and spillovers to the world economy," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 36(1), pages 1-13.
    7. Ron Martin, 2011. "The local geographies of the financial crisis: from the housing bubble to economic recession and beyond," Journal of Economic Geography, Oxford University Press, vol. 11(4), pages 587-618, July.
    8. David M. Kotz, 2009. "The Financial and Economic Crisis of 2008: A Systemic Crisis of Neoliberal Capitalism," Review of Radical Political Economics, Union for Radical Political Economics, vol. 41(3), pages 305-317, September.
    9. Mr. Marcello M. Estevão & Ms. Evridiki Tsounta, 2011. "Has the Great Recession Raised U.S. Structural Unemployment?," IMF Working Papers 2011/105, International Monetary Fund.
    10. Daly, Herman E, 1974. "The Economics of the Steady State," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 64(2), pages 15-21, May.
    11. Kallis, Giorgos, 2011. "In defence of degrowth," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 70(5), pages 873-880, March.
    12. Scott Marchi & James Hamilton, 2006. "Assessing the Accuracy of Self-Reported Data: an Evaluation of the Toxics Release Inventory," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 32(1), pages 57-76, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wen, Qiang & Zhang, Teng, 2022. "Economic policy uncertainty and industrial pollution: The role of environmental supervision by local governments," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 71(C).
    2. Muhammad Azher Hassan & Tariq Mehmood & Ehtisham Lodhi & Muhammad Bilal & Afzal Ahmed Dar & Junjie Liu, 2022. "Lockdown Amid COVID-19 Ascendancy over Ambient Particulate Matter Pollution Anomaly," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(20), pages 1-31, October.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Alcott, Blake, 2008. "The sufficiency strategy: Would rich-world frugality lower environmental impact," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 64(4), pages 770-786, February.
    2. Levin, Andrew T., 2014. "The design and communication of systematic monetary policy strategies," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 49(C), pages 52-69.
    3. Yuanyuan Zhu & Rui Zhang & Jiaxing Cui, 2022. "Spatial Differentiation and Influencing Factors in the Ecological Well-Being Performance of Urban Agglomerations in the Middle Reaches of the Yangtze River: A Hierarchical Perspective," IJERPH, MDPI, vol. 19(19), pages 1-22, October.
    4. John G. Fernald & Robert E. Hall & James H. Stock & Mark W. Watson, 2017. "The Disappointing Recovery of Output after 2009," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, Economic Studies Program, The Brookings Institution, vol. 48(1 (Spring), pages 1-81.
    5. Spash, Clive L., 2013. "The shallow or the deep ecological economics movement?," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 351-362.
    6. Clive L. Spash, 2012. "Towards the Integration of Social, Economic and Ecological Knowledge," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Julien-François Gerber & Rolf Steppacher (ed.), Towards an Integrated Paradigm in Heterodox Economics, chapter 1, pages 26-46, Palgrave Macmillan.
    7. Dario Caldara & Etienne Gagnon & Enrique Martinez-Garcia & Christopher J. Neely, 2020. "Monetary Policy and Economic Performance since the Financial Crisis," Working Papers 2020-026, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, revised 02 Nov 2020.
    8. Robert E. Hall, 2015. "Quantifying the Lasting Harm to the US Economy from the Financial Crisis," NBER Macroeconomics Annual, University of Chicago Press, vol. 29(1), pages 71-128.
    9. Chinn, Menzie & Ferrara, Laurent & Mignon, Valérie, 2014. "Explaining US employment growth after the great recession: The role of output–employment non-linearities," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 42(C), pages 118-129.
    10. Heindl, Peter & Kanschik, Philipp, 2016. "Ecological sufficiency, individual liberties, and distributive justice: Implications for policy making," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 42-50.
    11. Bisht, Arpita, 2022. "Sand futures: Post-growth alternatives for mineral aggregate consumption and distribution in the global south," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 191(C).
    12. Dario Caldara & Etienne Gagnon & Enrique Martínez García & Christopher J. Neely, 2021. "Monetary Policy and Economic Performance Since the Financial Crisis," Review, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, vol. 103(4), pages 425-460, October.
    13. Gladkykh, Ganna & Spittler, Nathalie & Davíðsdóttir, Brynhildur & Diemer, Arnaud, 2018. "Steady state of energy: Feedbacks and leverages for promoting or preventing sustainable energy system development," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 121-131.
    14. Alessandro De Matteis, 2019. "Decomposing the anthropogenic causes of climate change," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 21(1), pages 165-179, February.
    15. Petrella, Ivan & Drechsel, Thomas & Antolin-Diaz, Juan, 2014. "Following the Trend: Tracking GDP when Long-Run Growth is Uncertain," CEPR Discussion Papers 10272, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    16. Hall, R.E., 2016. "Macroeconomics of Persistent Slumps," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 2131-2181, Elsevier.
    17. Martin Groen, 2019. "Zero growth: A grand challenge for the Asia-Pacific region," Australian Journal of Management, Australian School of Business, vol. 44(4), pages 632-647, November.
    18. Daoud, Adel, 2018. "Unifying Studies of Scarcity, Abundance, and Sufficiency," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 147(C), pages 208-217.
    19. Idriss Fontaine, 2021. "Uncertainty and Labour Force Participation," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 83(2), pages 437-471, April.
    20. Xinhua Gu & Yang Zhang & Xiao Chang, 2017. "The role of financial systems for cross-country differences in the link between income and consumption inequality," Applied Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(24), pages 2365-2378, May.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:146:y:2018:i:c:p:184-192. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.