@article{Alpay:331057,
      recid = {331057},
      author = {Alpay, Savas},
      title = {Economic Development, Trade and Environmental Quality:  Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis in a Threshold  Model},
      address = {2002},
      pages = {18},
      year = {2002},
      note = {Presented at the 5th Annual Conference on Global Economic  Analysis, Taipei, Taiwan},
      abstract = {The proposed inverted U-type relationship between  environmental degradation and per capita income (known as  EKC hypothesis) has been re-examined in this paper.  Previous studies on EKC hypothesis are criticised due to  their assumption of the quadratic or cubic specification of  pollution with respect to income per capita; it is unclear  why the specific reduced-form equation employed in their  estimations exists. An important contribution of our study  is to overcome this problem by employing the threshold  estimation method developed by Hansen (1996, 2000), which  can directly and rigorously test EKC. We find no evidence  for EKC hypothesis between pollution and income; increases  in income reduce the load on the environment, but they do  not lead to improvement in environmental quality. Most  importantly, for the first time in the literature we take  openness to trade as the threshold variable, rather than  GDP per capita, and test for an EKC-type behavior. Our  results present a weak support for the hypothesis that  higher openness lead to improved environmental conditions.},
      url = {http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/331057},
}