Is the income inequality driven environmental degradation?

• Autor(a) principal: Almeida, Fábio Emanuel Valente de
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/10227
• topic: Ardl; Degradação Ambiental; Desigualdade do Rendimento; Pegada Ecológica; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

This study has the objective of examining the consequences of income inequality on environmental degradation for developed and developing countries for the period of 1990-2014. The CO2 emissions are usually the indicator used to measure the impact of humanity on the environment, however, this does not account the total impacts of production and consumption of goods and services. Recently, Ecological Footprint emerges as an alternate indicator. Ecological Footprint quantify the population demand, in terms of global hectares per capita, of for livestock, fish and dairy products, plant-based food and fiber products, timber and other forest products, the land area used for urban infrastructure like buildings, roads or reservoirs created by dams, timber and other forest products, the CO2 emissions emitted and the forest necessary to absorb carbon dioxide emissions from human activities. Moreover, as environmental degradation has increased worldwide, it is important to understand whether income inequality has played a role in this chaos. Therefore, the Driscoll-Kraay estimator with fixed effects was chosen to estimate the short and long-run effect of various drives in ecological footprint. The findings suggest that income inequality did not contributed to the ecological footprint in short-run but in long-run, inequality declines the ecological footprint in developing countries while expanding it in developed countries.