In the 1950s, a future Nobelist Simon Kuznets discovered the following phenomenon: as a country’s economy improves, inequality first grows but then decreases. In this paper, we provide a simple dynamical system-based explanation for this empirical phenomenon. 1 Kuznets Curve: A Brief Reminder and Need for an Explanation What is the Kuznets curve. In the 1950s, Simon Kuznets, an American economi...

No. There has never been good evidence for a pattern of rising inequality in low-income countries and falling inequality in higher income countries. The only evidence that appears to support the Kuznets hypothesis is the cross-sectional pattern of inequality levels across countries, although the Kuznets hypothesis is an assertion about the path of inequality within countries. Numerous cross-sec...

This paper examines why some countries have experienced environmental Kuznets curve (EKC)-type reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, while others have not. The hypothesis that climbing to the upper rungs of the electricity ladder (nuclear power and modern renewables) has been the primary mechanism via which countries have achieved substantial reductions in per capita CO2 emissions is te...

cointegration Classical regression analysis assumes that the error term in a regression is normally and independently distributed. An extreme violation of this condition is when the error term is a random walk. Such a regression is termed a spurious regression and the results are not reliable. It usually indicates that a required variable with random walk behavior has been omitted from the mode...

1. Introduction The environmental Kuznets curve is a hypothesized relationship between various indicators of environmental degradation and income per capita. In the early stages of economic growth degradation and pollution increase, but beyond some level of income per capita (which will vary for different indicators) the trend reverses, so that at high-income levels economic growth leads to env...

This paper presents new estimates of income inequality derived from Prussian tax statistics for the years 1822-1914. Confidence intervals are also calculated. The results show a rise in inequality in the nineteenth century, with a peak around 1906, thus supporting the view put forward by Simon Kuznets that industrialisation will initially lead to a rise in inequality. The paper goes on to consi...

T he environmental Kuznets curve posits an inverted-U relationship between pollution and economic development. Kuznets’s name was apparently attached to the curve by Grossman and Krueger (1993), who noted its resemblance to Kuznets’s inverted-U relationship between income inequality and development. In the first stage of industrialization, pollution in the environmental Kuznets curve world grow...

The empirical literature on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) purports to describe how a nation's environmental quality will evolve if it makes the transition from poverty to wealth. The popular generalization is that pollution will first increase and then, if income becomes sufficiently high, decline. Empirical support for this proposition is based primarily on crosscountry variations in i...