Environmental Kuznets curves—real progress or passing the buck ...
Environmental Kuznets curves—real progress or passing the buck ... Environmental Kuznets curves—real progress or passing the buck ...
182 D.S. Rothman / Ecological Economics 25 (1998) 177–194 tity relates environmental impact to population, affluence and technology. Ekins and Jacobs (1995) and Dietz and Rosa (1994), among others, modify this identity to speak of consumption specifically rather than affluence, yielding the equation I=PCT. The latter two terms can be expressed as GDP per capita and impact per unit of GDP. The composition of consumption has been included in some of the more recent formulations by stating consumption and technology as vectors rather than scalars (Amalric (1995), Ekins and Jacobs (1995), Raskin (1995) for other recent work considering the utility of and potential respecifications of the IPAT relationship). Although subject to some criticism and various revisions over the years, the IPAT relationship provides a basic reference for considering the impacts of human activity on the environment. The parallels between scale, composition and technique and population, consumption and technology are fairly obvious and may support the argument that either a production- or consumption-based approach to examining the EKC hypothesis would be equivalent. A fundamental philosophical problem exists, however, in adopting a production-based approach in exploring a hypothesis such as the EKC. As Rees (1995), Daly (1996) and Duchin (1998) argue, ‘‘most environmental degradation can be traced to the behavior of consumers either directly, through activities like the disposal of garbage or the use of cars, or indirectly through the production activities undertaken to satisfy them’’ Duchin (1998). Goods and services will not be produced, bought, sold and traded across borders, unless there is a demand for them 5 . Ekins (1997) raises specific reservations about using production-based approaches when a significant share of the changes in environmental impact are attributed to changing composition. ‘‘If the shift in production patterns has not been accompanied by a shift in consumption patterns, 5 This study leaves aside the issues of desired versus effective demand and the creation of artificial wants at this time. Suffice it to say that effective demand (be it for ‘true’ or ‘artificial’ wants), i.e. that which can actually result in the production of goods and services, is what the author is speaking of here. two conclusions follow: (1) environmental effects due to the composition effect are being displaced from one country to another, rather than reduced; and (2) this means of reducing environmental impacts will not be available to the latest-developing countries, because there will be no countries coming up behind them to which environmentally-intensive activities can be located. Of course, levels of resource use and environmental degradation are mediated by a number of factors. These include the technology used to produce and deliver the commodities to the user, the disposal of by-products generated in their production and consumption and the ultimate disposal of the commodities themselves 6 . Thus, one must consider these in conjunction with the scale and composition of consumption. The author will discuss the relationships between these later in the section on better measures of environmental impact. For the remainder of this section, though, the author would like to look at data on consumption to get a sense of its changing amounts and composition with income levels. Fig. 3A and B shows the quantities of per capita consumption for eight categories of consumer goods, accounting for all consumer expenditures for the year 1985 provided by the United Nations International Comparison Programme (United Nations 1994). The unit for each commodity is not a traditional measure such as kg, but rather the quantity of a commodity which can be bought for 1 $US at average international prices 7 . The author shows simple second order polynomials drawn through these data in order to 6 In an interesting interpretation of the disposal process, Hawken (1995) notes that what we have is not a consumption problem, but rather a non-consumption problem, in that ‘‘most of what we make cannot be consumed by anything at all’’. In a similar vein that clouds our interpretation of particular terms, Rees (1990) points out that what we consider economic production is ‘‘actually consumption, at best involving the conversion of ecological capital into man-made capital’’. 7 The most recent year for which consistent data are available for a global set of countries is 1985. Data from 1993 will be available some time in 1997. For more details on the International Comparison Programme data (United Nations, 1994; Rothman, 1993).
D.S. Rothman / Ecological Economics 25 (1998) 177–194 183 Fig. 3. Consumption by commodity category 1985, Part A (United Nations, 1994). Consumption by commodity category 1985, Part B (United Nations, 1994).
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Fig. 3. Consumption by commodity categ<strong>or</strong>y 1985, Part A (United Nations, 1994). Consumption by commodity categ<strong>or</strong>y 1985, Part<br />
B (United Nations, 1994).
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