Abstract:Will the world be able to sustain economic growth indefinitely without running into resource constraints or despoiling the environment beyond repair? The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis, which came to be known by analogy with the income-inequality relationship postulated by Simon Kuznets (1955), proposes that there is an inverted-U shape relation between environmental degradation and income per capita. This has been taken to imply that economic growth will eventually redress the environmental i...