This study investigated the relationship between income inequality, environmental degradation and economic development in Nigeria within the ambit of the Kuznets hypothesis and employed the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) technique. The findings indicate the non-existence of the Kuznets hypothesis in Nigeria; rather a scenario of a monotonically increasing relationship is observed between carbon dioxide emissions and economic development in Nigeria, especially in the short run. The results further showed that environmental degradation has a negative impact on economic development, but for Nigeria it is insignificant as in most developing countries; while income inequality however rises with economic development. Given that there is a trade-off between reducing carbon dioxide emissions and income inequality in Nigeria to boost growth and development, a clearly thought-out policy directed towards ensuring that increases in the income of the poor majority are not spent on carbon emitting activities is recommended.
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