ABSTRACT
Based on past experience of economic development, consumption of natural resource inputs, such as energy and materials, increases in line with increases in economic production. Recently, however, economists have observed a delinking of resource consumption from increased production, and indicators of delinking are becoming more and more popular for detecting and measuring improvements in the efficiency of economic activity in terms of environmental/resource consumption. Relative delinking is observed if the elasticity of an environmental impact indicator with respect to an economic driver is positive, but less than unity. The descending part of the bell shaped Kuznets curve instead provides evidence of absolute delinking. The environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis extends the basic
delinking reasoning, and models a multivariate analysis of the environmentincome relationship. In this chapter we provide empirical evidence on EKC and delinking
trends for municipal solid waste (MSW) by considering two disaggregated panel data sets of Italian provinces (20 regions over nine years and 103 provinces over seven years) which contribute to the existing literature in several ways. First, empirical evidence on delinking and EKC for waste is scarce. Research on delinking for materials and waste is far less developed than research on air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. Although some recent works (Bringezu et al. 2003) have produced extensive evidence on material intensity indicators, the still limited research results for the waste sector could become a problem from a policy perspective. Second, there are far fewer analyses exploiting country-specific, highly disaggregated panel data on waste compared with cross-country investigations. Our data sets cover the period 1996-2004 for 20 Italian regions, and 1999-2005 for 103 Italian provinces; data on waste generation are merged with official data on economic drivers at the same level of disaggregation, allowing us to demonstrate the advantages of country-specific analyses.1 Third, our analysis includes decentralized policy-related variables, in particular: share of municipalities
and population in each province, that have shifted from waste taxes to waste tariffs, the latter actually closest to environmental economic instruments in spirit; and percentage of waste management costs covered by the tax/tariff.2
