Economic Dynamics, Emission Trends and the EKC Hypothesis New Evidence Using NAMEA and Provincial Panel Data for Italy

This paper provides new empirical evidence on delinking trends concerning emission-related indicators in Italy. We discuss methodological issues regarding the analysis of delinking and examine the related Environmental Kuznets Curves (EKC) literature to explore and assess the most value added research lines after more than a decade of intensive research in the field. The main contribution of the paper is in providing EKC evidence exploiting environmental-economic merged panel datasets at a decentralized level exploiting long time series and rich cross section heterogeneity at both sectoral and provincial level. This crucially augments the unsatisfactory outcomes deriving from cross country analyses, which are less informative for policy purposes since they provide averages for environmental-economic relationships. Two panel datasets: 1990-2000 emissions at province level; and sectoral disaggregated NAMEA emissions sources for 1990-2001 are analyzed. We find mixed evidence supporting the EKC hypothesis. Some of the pollutants in the NAMEA data, such as CO2, CH4 and CO, produce inverted-U shaped curves with coherent within range turning points. Other emission trends fo