IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/gunwpe/0029.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Effects of Economic and Political Freedom on CO2 Emissions

Author

Listed:
  • Carlsson, Fredrik

    (Department of Economics, School of Economics and Commercial Law, Göteborg University)

  • Lundström, Susanna

    (Department of Economics, School of Economics and Commercial Law, Göteborg University)

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the effects of political and economic freedom on CO2 emissions. As far as we know this is the first cross-country study of the relationship between economic freedom and environmental quality. Economic freedom is measured in several ways. We find that increased price stability and legal structure decrease emissions in countries with a small industry share of GDP, but increases emissions in countries with a large industry share of GDP. The decreasing effect from increased use of market is significant but non-robust, and increased freedom to trade does not have any significant effect. The effect of political freedom on CO2 emissions is insignificant, most probably since CO2 emissions is a global environmental problem and hence subject to free-riding by the individual countries.

Suggested Citation

  • Carlsson, Fredrik & Lundström, Susanna, 2000. "The Effects of Economic and Political Freedom on CO2 Emissions," Working Papers in Economics 29, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics, revised 21 Feb 2003.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:gunwpe:0029
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/2807
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Sadequl Islam, 1996. "Economic freedom, per capita income and economic growth," Applied Economics Letters, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 3(9), pages 595-597.
    2. Cole, M.A. & Rayner, A.J. & Bates, J.M., 1997. "The environmental Kuznets curve: an empirical analysis," Environment and Development Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 2(4), pages 401-416, November.
    3. Barro, Robert J, 1996. "Democracy and Growth," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 1(1), pages 1-27, March.
    4. de Haan, Jakob & Sturm, Jan-Egbert, 2000. "On the relationship between economic freedom and economic growth," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 16(2), pages 215-241, June.
    5. Selden Thomas M. & Song Daqing, 1994. "Environmental Quality and Development: Is There a Kuznets Curve for Air Pollution Emissions?," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 147-162, September.
    6. Carlsson, Fredrik & Lundstrom, Susanna, 2002. "Economic Freedom and Growth: Decomposing the Effects," Public Choice, Springer, vol. 112(3-4), pages 335-344, September.
    7. Holtz-Eakin, Douglas & Selden, Thomas M., 1995. "Stoking the fires? CO2 emissions and economic growth," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 57(1), pages 85-101, May.
    8. Gene M. Grossman & Alan B. Krueger, 1995. "Economic Growth and the Environment," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 110(2), pages 353-377.
    9. Robert J. Barro, 1991. "Economic Growth in a Cross Section of Countries," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Oxford University Press, vol. 106(2), pages 407-443.
    10. James D. Gwartney & Robert A. Lawson & Randall G. Holcombe, 1999. "Economic Freedom and the Environment for Economic Growth," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 155(4), pages 643-643, December.
    11. Munasinghe, M. & Cruz, W., 1995. "Economywide Policies and the Environment: Lessosn froom Experience," Papers 10, World Bank - The World Bank Environment Paper.
    12. Congleton, Roger D, 1992. "Political Institutions and Pollution Control," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 74(3), pages 412-421, August.
    13. Levine, Ross & Renelt, David, 1992. "A Sensitivity Analysis of Cross-Country Growth Regressions," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(4), pages 942-963, September.
    14. Barrett, Scott & Graddy, Kathryn, 2000. "Freedom, growth, and the environment," Environment and Development Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 5(4), pages 433-456, October.
    15. Hilton, F. G. Hank & Levinson, Arik, 1998. "Factoring the Environmental Kuznets Curve: Evidence from Automotive Lead Emissions," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 126-141, March.
    16. Unruh, G. C. & Moomaw, W. R., 1998. "An alternative analysis of apparent EKC-type transitions," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(2), pages 221-229, May.
    17. Lopez, Ramon, 1997. "Environmental externalities in traditional agriculture and the impact of trade liberalization: the case of Ghana," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 53(1), pages 17-39, June.
    18. Panayotou, Theodore, 1997. "Demystifying the environmental Kuznets curve: turning a black box into a policy tool," Environment and Development Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 2(4), pages 465-484, November.
    19. repec:cdl:ucsbec:11-99 is not listed on IDEAS
    20. Deacon, Robert, 1999. "The Political Economy of Environment-Development Relationships: A Preliminary Framework," University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series qt8h33b5c0, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara.
    21. Stern, David I. & Common, Michael S. & Barbier, Edward B., 1996. "Economic growth and environmental degradation: The environmental Kuznets curve and sustainable development," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 24(7), pages 1151-1160, July.
    22. Shafik, Nemat, 1994. "Economic Development and Environmental Quality: An Econometric Analysis," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 46(0), pages 757-773, Supplemen.
    23. Shafik, Nemat & Bandyopadhyay, Sushenjit, 1992. "Economic growth and environmental quality : time series and cross-country evidence," Policy Research Working Paper Series 904, The World Bank.
    24. Moomaw, William R. & Unruh, Gregory C., 1997. "Are environmental Kuznets curves misleading us? The case of CO2 emissions," Environment and Development Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 2(4), pages 451-463, November.
    25. Magnani, Elisabetta, 2000. "The Environmental Kuznets Curve, environmental protection policy and income distribution," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 431-443, March.
    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. Martin Gassebner & Michael Lamla & Jan-Egbert Sturm, 2006. "Economic, demographic and political determinants of pollution reassessed," KOF Working papers 06-129, KOF Swiss Economic Institute, ETH Zurich.
    2. Martin Gassebner & Michael Lamla & Jan-Egbert Sturm, 2006. "Economic, Demographic and Political Determinants of Pollution Reassessed: A Sensitivity Analysis," CESifo Working Paper Series 1699, CESifo.
    3. Lamla, Michael J., 2009. "Long-run determinants of pollution: A robustness analysis," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(1), pages 135-144, November.

    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. Jie He, 2007. "Is the Environmental Kuznets Curve hypothesis valid for developing countries? A survey," Cahiers de recherche 07-03, Departement d'économique de l'École de gestion à l'Université de Sherbrooke.
    2. He, Jie & Richard, Patrick, 2010. "Environmental Kuznets curve for CO2 in Canada," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(5), pages 1083-1093, March.
    3. Dinda, Soumyananda, 2004. "Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis: A Survey," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 49(4), pages 431-455, August.
    4. Theodore Panayotou, 2000. "Economic Growth and the Environment," CID Working Papers 56A, Center for International Development at Harvard University.
    5. Stern, David I. & Common, Michael S., 2001. "Is There an Environmental Kuznets Curve for Sulfur?," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 41(2), pages 162-178, March.
    6. Deacon, Robert, 2003. "Dictatorship, Democracy, and the Provision of Public Goods," University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series qt9h54w76c, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara.
    7. Ezzati, Majid & Singer, Burton H. & Kammen, Daniel M., 2001. "Towards an Integrated Framework for Development and Environment Policy: The Dynamics of Environmental Kuznets Curves," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 29(8), pages 1421-1434, August.
    8. Dutta, Dilip & Ghosh, Paritosh Chandra, 2003. "Re-examining Economic Growth-Environment Relationship: Evidence from High-, Medium- And Low-Income Countries," Working Papers 3, University of Sydney, School of Economics.
    9. Roca, Jordi & Padilla, Emilio & Farre, Mariona & Galletto, Vittorio, 2001. "Economic growth and atmospheric pollution in Spain: discussing the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 39(1), pages 85-99, October.
    10. Sigrid Stagl, 1999. "Delinking Economic Growth from Environmental Degradation? A Literature Survey on the Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis," Working Papers geewp06, Vienna University of Economics and Business Research Group: Growth and Employment in Europe: Sustainability and Competitiveness.
    11. Miguel Rodríguez & Yolanda Pena-Boquete, 2013. "Mishandling carbon intensities," Working Papers 1302, Universidade de Vigo, Departamento de Economía Aplicada.
    12. Marzio Galeotti, 2007. "Economic Growth And The Quality Of The Environment: Taking Stock," Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, Springer, vol. 9(4), pages 427-454, November.
    13. Álvarez-Herránz, Agustín & Balsalobre, Daniel & Cantos, José María & Shahbaz, Muhammad, 2017. "Energy Innovations-GHG Emissions Nexus: Fresh Empirical Evidence from OECD Countries," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 101(C), pages 90-100.
    14. Stern, David I., 2004. "The Rise and Fall of the Environmental Kuznets Curve," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 32(8), pages 1419-1439, August.
    15. Marzio Galeotti, 2003. "Economic Development and Environmental Protection," Working Papers 2003.89, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei.
    16. C. Seri & A. de Juan Fernandez, 2021. "The relationship between economic growth and environment. Testing the EKC hypothesis for Latin American countries," Papers 2105.11405, arXiv.org.
    17. Richard T. Carson, 2010. "The Environmental Kuznets Curve: Seeking Empirical Regularity and Theoretical Structure," Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 4(1), pages 3-23, Winter.
    18. Wang, Sophie Xuefei & Fu, Yu Benjamin & Zhang, Zhe George, 2015. "Population growth and the environmental Kuznets curve," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 36(C), pages 146-165.
    19. Balsalobre-Lorente, Daniel & Shahbaz, Muhammad & Roubaud, David & Farhani, Sahbi, 2018. "How economic growth, renewable electricity and natural resources contribute to CO2 emissions?," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 356-367.
    20. Sabuj Kumar Mandal & Devleena Chakravarty, 2017. "Role of energy in estimating turning point of Environmental Kuznets Curve: an econometric analysis of the existing studies," Journal of Social and Economic Development, Springer;Institute for Social and Economic Change, vol. 19(2), pages 387-401, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Carbon Dioxide; Economic Freedom; Institutions; Political Freedom;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • O10 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Development - - - General
    • O40 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economic Growth and Aggregate Productivity - - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:hhs:gunwpe:0029. 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: Ann-Christin Räätäri Nyström (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/naiguse.html .

    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.