Against the analytical backdrop of environmental federalism, the paper examines the impact of fiscally decentralized public policy stance on environmental quality in India. Unlike many studies which analysed the fiscally decentralized determination of environmental welfare from tax-side through modeling interjurisdictional competition and ‘race to bottom’, this paper attempts to look at the link from public expenditure side in a Kuznets’ U specification. The paper does not refute the widely explored Kuznets U phenomenon between economic growth and the environmental quality, rather it emphasizes that it does substantially through conscious public policies on reforestation and pollution abatement with adequate public expenditure decisions. Using GSLS and fixed effects model of pooled least squares for the late 1990s, the analysis of the link between decentralized environmental expenditure in per capita terms and the environmental quality indicators for the forestry sector revealed that there is a positive functional relationship between the variables. The models also revealed the effectiveness of economic growth variables in creating the Kuznet’s U effect on environmental quality. However, the panel estimates showed that fiscal policy has a stronger impact on environmental quality than the Kuznets U-impact of economic growth. This result is in confirmation with the trend that fiscal policies on environmental capital formation gets transformed to the end results of better environmental quality indicators, despite the constraints of initial negative impacts of economic growth on ecology.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by University Library of Munich, Germany in its series MPRA Paper with number
7605.
Find related papers by JEL classification: E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy Q56 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environment and Development; Environment and Trade; Sustainability; Environmental Accounting C33 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Multiple or Simultaneous Equation Models; Multiple Variables - - - Models with Panel Data
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.: