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Freedom, growth, and the environment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2000

SCOTT BARRETT  and
KATHRYN GRADDY
SCOTT BARRETT
Affiliation:
Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, 1619 Massachusetts Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036–2213, USA. Tel: (202) 663–5761. Fax: (202) 663–5769. email: [email protected]
KATHRYN GRADDY
Affiliation:
Exeter College, Oxford University
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Abstract

A number of recent papers have found that certain measures of pollution worsen and later improve as income per head increases. It is widely believed that the downhill portion of this inverted-U curve reflects an induced policy response; that, as incomes rise, citizens demand improvements in environmental quality, and that these demands are delivered by the political system. In this paper we find that, for a number of pollution variables, an increase in civil and political freedoms significantly improves environmental quality. For other pollution variables, however, we find that freedoms have no effect. The former finding suggests that political reforms may be as important as economic reforms in improving environmental quality worldwide. The latter finding hints that the observation that pollution levels fall with income, once income becomes high enough, may not always reflect an induced policy response.

Type
Research Article
Information
Environment and Development Economics , Volume 5 , Issue 4 , October 2000 , pp. 433 - 456
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

We are grateful to Gene Grossman and Alan Krueger for supplying us with their computer programs and data. We also thank Freedom House for making their data available to us. Our research was partly funded by a MacArthur Foundation grant to the Global Environment and Trade Study. We have learned much about the topic of this paper from Partha Dasgupta, Paul Ehrlich, and Karl-Göran Mäler. Jagdish Bhagwati, Robert Deacon, Charles Perrings, and Todd Sandler provided helpful comments on an earlier draft, as did participants at the June 1998 World Congress of Environmental and Resource Economists, the NBER's 1998 Summer Institute, and the GETS/MacArthur Foundation Workshop on Trade and Environment.