11月27日国际经济贸易学院讲座－袁嘉（澳门大学工商管理学院）
报告人: 袁嘉，澳门大学工商管理学院
时间：11月27日，周四，下午1：30-3：00
地点：博学楼1222教室
题目：Does democracy change the Environmental Kuznets Curve? Evidence from air visibility
摘要：It is commonly found that pollution intensity first rises with economic growth but then retreats as the GDP per capita reaches a certain threshold, thus supporting the Environment Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis. However, this could merely be an illusion for countries without democracy. In theory, the threshold of the EKC could be too high to reach for countries without democracy even though it is low for democratic ones. Existing empirical evidence, however, largely represents the democratic world due to the systematic lack of pollution data in non-democratic countries. Econometrically, this non-representative sampling may bias the estimates of the EKC for both types of economies. In this study, we propose a solution by employing a unique global air visibility database that covers the entire world. In addition, we apply linguistic diversity as an instrumental variable to address the potential endogeneity in democracy following Barro (1999). Our empirical findings suggest a strikingly large gap between the turning points of the EKC of countries with different levels of democracy. Specifically, although an EKC relationship still exists in weak-democracy countries, their turning points are around US$ 14,000, which is double those of countries with a high level of democracy and well above the average income level of the autocratic countries (around US$ 6,800).
