Empirical essays on the relationship between economic growth and the environment.

Summary This thesis contributes to the debate on the relationship between economic growth and the environment. The literature review on the environmental Kuznets curve, constituting the first chapter, is the basis for the empirical tests described in the following chapters. The second chapter examines eight indicators of sustainable development and presents their numerical evaluations at the national level between 1990 and 2000. The comparison of the evolution of the different measures shows that France's development was sustainable in the weak sense, but not sustainable in the strong sense over the decade studied. The third chapter focuses on the stochastic convergence of individual sulphur dioxide (SO2) and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions over samples composed of 81 nations from 1950 to 1990 and 127 countries from 1950 to 2003, respectively. We test this hypothesis by applying an alternative and recent econometric methodology developed by Pesaran (2007). The results of the unit root and stationarity tests suggest that the process of environmental convergence is limited, even among OECD countries. In the last chapter, based on the study of Hausmann et al. (2005), we identify episodes of accelerating CO2 emissions growth and episodes of decay for 124 economies from 1950 to 2004. We use binary panel econometrics to identify the economic, demographic and institutional factors that explain the occurrence of these episodes. Since the explanatory power of the significant variables is low, our empirical analysis suggests that the onset of acceleration and deceleration episodes remains highly unpredictable.