Summary: | 碩士 === 中國文化大學 === 經濟學系 === 101 === This study investigates the relationships of CO2 emissions and income for 23 countries with different involvement the international treaty of the Kyoto Protocol. This study inspects the empirical time-path of the turning points of the inverted U-shaped Environmental Kuznets Curve by Rolling Regression technique for four panel groups of countries and five single countries with time series data. The panel data include 23 countries; we classify them to four groups with different involvement in and attitude to Kyoto Protocol. The first group is 16 countries of OECD. They are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Norway, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, Sweden, and United Kingdom. These 16 countries had signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol. The second group is the US and Canada. The US had signed but never ratified. Canada had signed and ratified but quits Kyoto Protocol in 2012. The third group includes large developing countries such as China, India and Brazil. In current version of Kyoto Protocol, these countries take no responsibility to reduce emission. The last group is small developing economies such as Taiwan, and South Korea. And this study chooses 5 (Germany, Italy, Japan, India and Taiwan) among the 23 countries to investigate single country emission patterns. The results suggest that there are significant carbon dioxide reduction effects in the chosen 16 countries of OECD with a declining trend of turning point. For the US, Canada and developing countries, the EKC turning points have no significant declining trend. In some periods of time, the turning points do not exist. In the single country analysis, the turning points of Germany and Japan, present downward trends. The turning points of Italy have downward trend in most periods of time, except in recent financial crisis. For India and Taiwan, the carbon emissions continue their expansion trends. The results evidence that those countries take carbon-reduction responsibility through Kyoto Protocol participation, have significant carbon reduction effects. For the carbon reduction to be successful in the future, more countries need to support international carbon reduction treaty and take responsibility for emission reductions.
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