Growth and Environment

Abstract

The 1972 Stockholm convention initiated the debate over whether economic growth and environmental degradation are complementary or substitute. In 1983, the Brundtland commission began incorporating environmental considerations into conventional economics. Almost at the same time, the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis gained popularity and behind the veil of the EKC hypothesis the developed countries started putting pressure on the developing and least developed countries to be pro-growth even at the cost of the environment so that they come at par of the developed nations. In this background, the present chapter considers 41 Asian countries over five years spanning from 2015 to 2019. It has taken per capita emission of CO2 (metric-ton) as the dependent variable and growth of per capita income along with access to electricity as the independent variable. The result indicates that there is no statistically significant impact of per capita income growth on the emission of per capita CO2 and the EKC hypothesis does not hold for the Asian continent.