1. QUICK DESIGN GUIDE (--THIS SECTION DOES NOT PRINT--) This PowerPoint 2007 template produces a 36x48 inch professional poster. You can use it to create your research poster and save valuable time placing titles, subtitles, text, and graphics. We provide a series of online tutorials that will guide you through the poster design process and answer your poster production questions. To view our template tutorials, go online to PosterPresentations.com and click on HELP DESK. When you are ready to print your poster, go online to PosterPresentations.com. Need Assistance? Call us at 1.866.649.3004 Object Placeholders Using the placeholders To add text, click inside a placeholder on the poster and type or paste your text. To move a placeholder, click it once (to select it). Place your cursor on its frame, and your cursor will change to this symbol Click once and drag it to a new location where you can resize it. Section Header placeholder Click and drag this preformatted section header placeholder to the poster area to add another section header. Use section headers to separate topics or concepts within your presentation. Text placeholder Move this preformatted text placeholder to the poster to add a new body of text. Picture placeholder Move this graphic placeholder onto your poster, size it first, and then click it to add a picture to the poster. RESEARCH POSTER PRESENTATION DESIGN © 2012 www.PosterPresentations.com Student discounts are available on our Facebook page. Go to PosterPresentations.com and click on the FB icon. QUICK TIPS (--THIS SECTION DOES NOT PRINT--) This PowerPoint template requires basic PowerPoint (version 2007 or newer) skills. Below is a list of commonly asked questions specific to this template. If you are using an older version of PowerPoint some template features may not work properly. Template FAQs Verifying the quality of your graphics Go to the VIEW menu and click on ZOOM to set your preferred magnification. This template is at 100% the size of the final poster. All text and graphics will be printed at 100% their size. To see what your poster will look like when printed, set the zoom to 100% and evaluate the quality of all your graphics before you submit your poster for printing. Modifying the layout This template has four different column layouts. Right-click your mouse on the background and click on LAYOUT to see the layout options. The columns in the provided layouts are fixed and cannot be moved but advanced users can modify any layout by going to VIEW and then SLIDE MASTER. Importing text and graphics from external sources TEXT: Paste or type your text into a pre-existing placeholder or drag in a new placeholder from the left side of the template. Move it anywhere as needed. PHOTOS: Drag in a picture placeholder, size it first, click in it and insert a photo from the menu. TABLES: You can copy and paste a table from an external document onto this poster template. To adjust the way the text fits within the cells of a table that has been pasted, right-click on the table, click FORMAT SHAPE then click on TEXT BOX and change the INTERNAL MARGIN values to 0.25. Modifying the color scheme To change the color scheme of this template go to the DESIGN menu and click on COLORS. You can choose from the provided color combinations or create your own. © 2013 PosterPresentations.com 2117 Fourth Street, Unit C Berkeley CA 94710 posterpresenter@gmail.com Social and economic development, as a means of eradicating poverty, has caused various environmental problems and amongst them is climate change. Carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) is the most important greenhouse gas emitted through human activities and it causes global warming. The publication of the “Limits to Growth” (Meadows et al., 1972) has spurred the debate between economic growth versus environmental degradation and this debate is still topical. The 2012 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Doha has also made the debate more interesting with the adoption of the concept of “loss and damage”. Studying the link between economic growth and environmental degradation has generated the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. The EKC hypothesizes that at the early stages of economic growth, the CO 2 emissions increase, but beyond some levels of income per capita, the trend reverses, so that at high-income levels, economic growth leads to environmental improvement. Several studies had studied the link between CO 2 emissions and income per capita and there are mixed results. Nevertheless, most, if not all of the empirical models underlying these studies, though rigorous, do not account for endogeneity in EKC. Not accounting for endogeneity in empirical studies of the EKC is one of the main critique. The increase of income per capita could increase the CO 2 emissions, and the increase of the CO 2 emissions could negatively affect crop production, people’s health and productivity, thus reducing income per capita. Another issue that needs further investigation is the reverse causality between the CO 2 emissions and trade liberalization. CO 2 emissions and trade liberalization might be interrelated and interactive. Introduction Objectives of the study We use a panel data model for the period ranging from 1960 to 2012 with up to 190 countries. The data are from the World Bank Development indicator (WDI). We apply two models. The first model omits the problem of endogeneity between the income per capita and environmental degradation, trade liberalization and environmental degradation. The estimated model is: E stands for per capita CO 2 emissions, Y is the income per capita, Trade is trade liberalization. Energy is the energy consumption c i is an individual-specific effect which represents individual country effects, capturing cultural and other time ‐ invariant factors, e is a stochastic error term. We use a fixed and random effect models. Hausman test is carried out to select the accurate model. The second model takes into account the reverse causality in model and it is estimated by means of instrumental variables and GMM. With regards to the income per capita, based on Lin and Liscow (2013), we choose age dependency ratio and total debt service as instruments. These two instruments are highly correlated with income per capita, but they do not have a direct effect on per capita CO 2 emissions. For trade liberalization, based on previous work from gravity model of bilateral trade openness (see for instance Frankel and Rose, 2002), population, land area were chosen as valid instruments for trade liberalization. Materials and methodsResults and discussionConclusion and future work This paper investigates the relationship between CO 2 emissions (a major greenhouse gas) and economic growth, CO 2 emissions and trade liberalization while accounting for endogeneity by using an international panel model on data ranging from 1960 to 2012. The issue of reverse causality between income per capita and CO 2 emissions, trade liberalization and CO 2 emissions is seldom addressed in previous works. Four measures of trade liberalization were used namely trade-to-GDP ratio, taxes on international trade, import duties and export duties. By using relevant instrumental variables, in general, we found out that there is a statistical evidence of endogeneity in the relationship between income per capita and CO 2 emissions, trade liberalization and CO 2 emissions. Furthermore, we found evidence for an inverted-U relationship between income per capita and CO 2 emissions after controlling for endogeneity. In other words, as countries experience economic growth, environmental deterioration seems to eventually slow down. With regards to the relationship between CO 2 emissions and trade liberalization, the results are mixed and this depends on how trade liberalization is measured and the model used. If we rely only on the IV- GMM, trade-to-GDP ratio is statistically associated with the degradation of the environment whereas import duties and export duties are statistically associated with an improvement of the environment. A 1% increase of trade-to-ratio will contribute to 40% increase of CO 2 emissions. However, an increase of 1% of import duties, 1% export duties will contribute to 15%, 15% reduction of CO 2 emissions respectively. In order to curb the CO 2 emissions, policymakers could encourage green technologies, renewable energies and built a more binding international agreement for all the countries of the planet. One possible avenue for future research will be to integrate spatial dependence in the EKC. This could help to better study transboundary pollutions. Acknowledgements We acknowledge the comments received from the participants of 2013 Applied Economics conference in Granada-Spain. In this current paper, we add more inputs on the current debate on the EKC by addressing the endogeneity in the relationship between income per capita and CO 2 emissions, trade liberalization and CO 2 emissions in an international panel data study ranging from 1960 to 2012. Four measures of the trade liberalization were used for robustness check : trade-to-GDP ratio, taxes on international trade, import duties and export duties. 1 CREM, UMR CNRS 6211, University of Rennes I, France; 2 Kinder Institute for Urban Research-Rice University, USA Hermann Pythagore Pierre Donfouet 1, Pierre Wilner Jeanty 2, Eric Malin 1 Economic growth and CO 2 emissions in the World: A simultaneous panel data analysis