Three Essays on the Relationship between Economic Development and Environmental Quality

Abstract

This thesis is concerned with examining the relationship between indicators of economic growth and environmental quality. During this process, the analysis explores and attempts to interlink the following theoretical and empirical frameworks: Angelsen and Kaimowitz’s theories for deforestation, the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis and the forest transition theory. Macro-level data are used to examine the implications of these frameworks. The implications of the first essay suggest that different crops have a different impact on rate of change of agricultural land use. The second analysis suggests that the results from a Directed Acyclical Graph Approach present a uni-directional causal relationship between income and pollution emissions. The third and final essay suggests that property rights structures and economic incentives appear to be the most probable explanations for the forest transition in India. The macro-level nature of the data sets employed provides information on the broad trends and patterns. For policy recommendations, a more detailed and specific analysis needs to be carried out concentrating on a certain region.