Economic Growth and Pollution in different Political Regimes

I examine the association between nighttime light luminosity and ten pollution measures (CO2, CO, NOx,SO2, NMVOC, NH3, BC, OC, PM10 and PM2.5) across dierent political regimes at a local level. Although the eects of the political system and economic growth on pollution have been widely analyzed at the country level, this is the rst study to do so at the grid level. The empirical analysis yields three major insights. First, economic growth is positively associated with a wide array of dierent pollution measures. Second, there are signicant dierences in the association between economic growth and air pollution across dierent political regimes. For example, the association between nighttime light luminosity and air pollution is strictly positive for autocracies. The association between nighttime luminosity and air pollution is substantially smaller but still positive for democracies. Furthermore, among democracies the relationship between nighttime light luminosity and air pollution is concave for nine out of ten pollutants; among autocracies, the relationship is either convex (ve out of ten pollutants) or the squared term is insignicant. Third, the dierences among political regimes is driven chiey by pollution emissions in the industry, energy, and transport sectors; there is no dierence between autocracies and democracies in terms of the eect of growth on emissions in the agricultural and residential sectors.