PRESENTED BY:Rupesh Sonali Sonika

The environmental Kuznets curve is a hypothesized relationship between various indicators of environmental degradation and income per capita.

The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesizes that the relationship between per capita income and the use of natural resources or the emission of wastes has an inverted Ushape.

In the early stages of economic growth, degradation and pollution increase, but beyond some level of income per capita the trend reverses, so that at high-income levels economic growth leads to environmental improvement.

The EKC takes after the name of Simon Kuznets who had famously hypothesized an inverted U income-inequality relationship (Kuznets, 1955). Later economists found this hypothesis analogous to the income-pollution relationship and popularized the phrase Environmental Kuznets Curve.

The EKC hypothesis contends that pollution increases initially as a country develops its industry and thereafter declines after reaching a certain level of economic progress. It suggests that environmental damage is unavoidable in the initial stage of economic development and therefore, has to be tolerated until the inversion effect kicks in.

1. The turning point for pollution is the result of more affluent and progressive communities placing greater value on the cleaner environment and thus putting into place institutional and non-institutional measures to affect this.

2. Pollution increases at the early phase of a countrys industrialization due to the setting up of rudimentary, inefficient and polluting industries. When industrialization is sufficiently advanced, service industries will gain prominence. This will reduce pollution further.

3. When a country begins industrialization, the scale effect will take place and pollution increases. Further along the trajectory, firms switching to less-polluting industries results in the composition effect, which levels the rate of pollution . Finally, the technique effect comes into play when mature companies invest in pollution abatement equipment and technology, which reduces pollution.

Scale effect Composition effect Technique effect

 at

low levels of income, pollution will rise with neutral growth because the policy response is weak. income rises, the policy response becomes stronger, hence pollution will start to fall as income increases.

As

At low incomes, pollution initially rises with growth because increased consumption is valued highly relative to environmental quality. As income rises, the willingness to pay for environmental quality rises, and increasingly large sacrifices in consumption are made to provide great environmental benefits. The EKC says that the pollution will first increase with the level of GDP per capita, reach maximum at around $8,000 and then decrease at higher levels of income.

It has been argued that this trend occurs in the level of many of the environmental pollutants, such as sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, lead DDT, chlorofluorocarbons, sewage and other chemicals previously released directly into the air or water.

Researchers like Panayotou (1997), have even found a significant cubic Income-SO2 relationship that takes the form of an N curve, where the turning points are $5000 and $15000. This means that in this example. SO2 will increase indefinitely beyond $15000.

 For

example, between 1970 and 2006, the United States' inflation-adjusted GDP grew by 195%, the number of cars and trucks in the country more than doubled, and the total number of miles driven increased by 178%. the same time period the annual

However, during

emissions of co falls from 197 m tons to 89m tons no falls from 27 m tons to 19 m tons so2 falls from 31 m tons to 15 m tons lead emission fall by 80 %

 However

energy, land and resource uses do not fall with rising income, While the ratio of energy per real GDP has fallen, total energy use is still rising in most developed countries example is the emission of many greenhouse gases, which is much higher in industrialized countries

Another

In general, Kuznets curves have been found for some environmental health concerns (such as air pollution) but not for others (such as landfills and biodiversity). However, it is important to note that this does not necessarily invalidate the hypothesis . The scale of the Kuznets curves may differ for different environmental impacts and different regions. If the concept is accurate, a given area may need more wealth in order to see a decline in environmental pollutants.