Testing Environmental Kuznets Curve Hypothesis for N2O

N2O, one of the most harmful of greenhouse gases, causes great damage to the environment. Although it does not attract as much attention as CO2, policies to reduce the emission of this gas are of great importance for a sustainable environment and economy. As the untimely implementation of policies can lead to inefficiency and waste of scarce resources, their timings should be considered carefully. At this point, the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) approach makes a great contribution to the determination timings of policies. In this study, we investigated the EKC relation for N2O emission using the panel data of selected 20 European countries and Turkey, to examine the relationship between N2O emissions and economic growth. For this purpose, we applied the panel ARDL test to the panel data set for the period 1992-2017. According to the panel ARDL results, there is a statistically significant long-run relationship between N2O emission and economic growth. This relationship forms an "N" shaped curve.