Resumen de Economic, Demographic and Political Determinants of Pollution Reassessed: A Sensitivity Analysis

Martin Gassebner, Michael Lamla, Jan-Egbert Sturm

• Recent literature proposes many variables as significant determinants of pollution.

  This paper asks whether their estimated impact on both water and air pollution is robust to alterations of the conditioning information set. For that purpose, we apply so-called Extreme Bound Analysis (EBA) on a panel of 208 countries covering the period 1960�2001. Within our set of 21 explanatory variables, we in particularly focus upon the effect of economic and political freedom on pollution, demographic issues and the reassessment of the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis.

  We find supportive evidence on the existence of the environmental Kuznets curve. Furthermore, demographic variables and variables capture the economic structure of a country contribute in explaining air and water pollution.

  However, there does not appear to be a robust relationship between politicoinstitutional factors and environmental quality.