IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/smu/ecowpa/002.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Distribution of Pollution in the United States: An Environmental Gini Approach

Author

Listed:
  • Millimet, Daniel L.

    (Southern Methodist University)

  • Slottje, Daniel

    (Southern Methodist University)

Abstract

The concepts of an environmental Gini coefficient along with a measure of ''pollution elasticity'' are introduced and used to analyze the distribution of pollution across U.S. states from 1988 -- 1996. The special properties of the Gini coefficient allow one to decompose overall pollution inequality into several components based on pollution type and predict the effects on overall pollution inequality from stricter regulations on particular types of emissions. In addition, an environmental welfare function -- analogous to Sen's social welfare function -- is derived and used along with the extended Gini to analyze the impact of tighter environmental regulations on different types of emissions. Finally, Spearman correlations between per capita emissions and state attributes are used to assess whether states at the upper tail of the pollution distribution are randomly assigned. The emissions data is obtained from the U.S. EPA's Toxic Release Inventory (TRI).

Suggested Citation

  • Millimet, Daniel L. & Slottje, Daniel, 1999. "The Distribution of Pollution in the United States: An Environmental Gini Approach," Departmental Working Papers 002, Southern Methodist University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:smu:ecowpa:002
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://ftp1.economics.smu.edu/WorkingPapers/1999/millimet/gini.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Brooks, Nancy & Sethi, Rajiv, 1997. "The Distribution of Pollution: Community Characteristics and Exposure to Air Toxics," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 32(2), pages 233-250, February.
    2. Cropper, Maureen L. & Simon, Nathalie B. & Alberini, Anna & Sharma, P. K., 1997. "The health effects of air pollution in Delhi, India," Policy Research Working Paper Series 1860, The World Bank.
    3. Lerman, Robert I & Yitzhaki, Shlomo, 1985. "Income Inequality Effects by Income," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 67(1), pages 151-156, February.
    4. Lerman, Robert I. & Yitzhaki, Shlomo, 1984. "A note on the calculation and interpretation of the Gini index," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 15(3-4), pages 363-368.
    5. Harrison, David Jr. & Rubinfeld, Daniel L., 1978. "The distribution of benefits from improvements in urban air quality," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 5(4), pages 313-332, December.
    6. Seema Arora & Timothy N. Cason, 1999. "Do Community Characteristics Influence Environmental Outcomes? Evidence from the Toxics Release Inventory," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 65(4), pages 691-716, April.
    7. Ostro, Bart D. & Eskeland, Gunnar S. & Feyzioglu, Tarhan & Sanchez, Jose Miguel, 1998. "Air pollution and health effects - a study of respiratory illness among children in Santiago, Chile," Policy Research Working Paper Series 1932, The World Bank.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Yitzhaki, Shlomo, 2002. "Do we need a separate poverty measurement?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 18(1), pages 61-85, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Parry, Ian W.H. & Sigman, Hilary & Walls, Margaret & Williams, Roberton C., III, 2005. "The Incidence of Pollution Control Policies," Discussion Papers 10651, Resources for the Future.
    2. D'Errico, Marco & Macchiarelli, Corrado & Serafini, Roberta, 2015. "Differently unequal: Zooming-in on the distributional dimensions of the crisis in euro area countries," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 48(C), pages 93-115.
    3. Zahran, Sammy & Iverson, Terrence & McElmurry, Shawn P. & Weiler, Stephan & Levitt, Ryan, 2019. "Hidden Costs of Blight and Arson in Detroit: Evidence From a Natural Experiment in Devil's Night," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 157(C), pages 266-277.
    4. Peter Grösche & Carsten Schröder, 2014. "On the redistributive effects of Germany’s feed-in tariff," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 46(4), pages 1339-1383, June.
    5. Eskeland, Gunnar*Chingying Kong, 1998. "Protecting the environment and the poor - a public goods framework applied to Indonesia," Policy Research Working Paper Series 1961, The World Bank.
    6. Banzhaf, H. Spencer, 2011. "The Political Economy of Environmental Justice," MPRA Paper 101191, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    7. Cory, Dennis C. & Rahman, Tauhidur, 2009. "Environmental justice and enforcement of the safe drinking water act: The Arizona arsenic experience," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 68(6), pages 1825-1837, April.
    8. Chintrakarn, Pandej & Millimet, Daniel L., 2006. "The environmental consequences of trade: Evidence from subnational trade flows," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 52(1), pages 430-453, July.
    9. Schechtman, Edna & Yitzhaki, Shlomo, 1985. "A Measure of Association Based on Gini's Mean Difference," Working Papers 232621, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Center for Agricultural Economic Research.
    10. De Silva, Dakshina G. & McComb, Robert P. & Schiller, Anita R. & Slechten, Aurelie, 2021. "Firm behavior and pollution in small geographies," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 136(C).
    11. Erwin Bulte & John A. List & Mark C. Strazicich, 2007. "Regulatory Federalism And The Distribution Of Air Pollutant Emissions," Journal of Regional Science, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 47(1), pages 155-178, February.
    12. Daniel L. Millimet & John A. List, 2003. "A Natural Experiment on the ‘Race to the Bottom’ Hypothesis: Testing for Stochastic Dominance in Temporal Pollution Trends," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 65(4), pages 395-420, September.
    13. Magali Delmas & Michael W. Toffel, 2004. "Stakeholders and environmental management practices: an institutional framework," Business Strategy and the Environment, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 13(4), pages 209-222, July.
    14. Zwickl, Klara & Ash, Michael & Boyce, James K., 2014. "Regional variation in environmental inequality: Industrial air toxics exposure in U.S. cities," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 107(C), pages 494-509.
    15. Banzhaf, H. Spencer & Walsh, Randall P., 2013. "Segregation and Tiebout sorting: The link between place-based investments and neighborhood tipping," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 74(C), pages 83-98.
    16. Banzhaf, H. Spencer & Walsh, Randy, 2006. "Do People Vote with Their Feet? An Empirical Test of Environmental Gentrification," RFF Working Paper Series dp-06-10, Resources for the Future.
    17. Cole, Matthew A. & Elliott, Robert J.R. & Khemmarat, Khemrutai, 2013. "Local exposure to toxic releases: Examining the role of ethnic fractionalization and polarisation," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(C), pages 249-259.
    18. Akli Berri, 2009. "Transport consumption inequalities and redistributive effects of taxes: A repeated cross-sectional evaluation on French household data," Working Papers 145, ECINEQ, Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.
    19. Alberto Arcagni, 2017. "On the decomposition by sources of the Zenga 1984 point and synthetic inequality indexes," Statistical Methods & Applications, Springer;Società Italiana di Statistica, vol. 26(1), pages 113-133, March.
    20. Germani, Anna Rita & Morone, Piergiuseppe & Testa, Giuseppina, 2014. "Environmental justice and air pollution: A case study on Italian provinces," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 106(C), pages 69-82.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Pollution; Gini Coefficient; Inequality; Environmental Justice; Environmental Regulation;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q0 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - General
    • J1 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics
    • R3 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location
    • C5 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling
    • H0 - Public Economics - - General

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:smu:ecowpa:002. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Ömer Özak (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.smu.edu/economics .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.