Volume 27, Issue 4, November 2019, Pages 1014–1023
Friday Bassey Agala1 and Felix Awara Eke2
1 Lecturers, Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Calabar, PMB 1115, Calabar, Nigeria
2 Lecturers, Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Calabar, PMB 1115, Calabar, Nigeria
Original language: English
Copyright © 2019 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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.
Author Keywords: Income inequality, Kuznets hypothesis, Environmental Degradation, Economic Development, ARDL technique.
Friday Bassey Agala1 and Felix Awara Eke2
1 Lecturers, Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Calabar, PMB 1115, Calabar, Nigeria
2 Lecturers, Department of Economics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Calabar, PMB 1115, Calabar, Nigeria
Original language: English
Copyright © 2019 ISSR Journals. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Abstract
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.
Author Keywords: Income inequality, Kuznets hypothesis, Environmental Degradation, Economic Development, ARDL technique.
How to Cite this Article
Friday Bassey Agala and Felix Awara Eke, “Income Inequality, Environmental Degradation and Economic Development Nexus in Nigeria: Reassessing the Kuznets Hypothesis,” International Journal of Innovation and Applied Studies, vol. 27, no. 4, pp. 1014–1023, November 2019.
