Environmental Kuznets curve and environmental convergence: A unified empirical framework for CO2 emissions

This paper provides a unified framework to investigate simultaneously environmental convergence and the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis, which were usually separately investigated in existing literature. We propose an application on CO2 emissions data consisting of 106 countries observed over the period 1970-2010. We adopt an instrumental semiparametric panel data model and we compare the estimates with standard parametric methods. There is no evidence supporting the environmental Kuznets hypothesis, even for the OECD countries, while a convergence process takes place, even though it is not associated with a reduction in CO2 emissions. Results are robust across specifications.