Our estimation framework can be thought of as a modified version of the traditional EKC framework familiar to economists. The modifications are twofold. First, we do not use emissions per capita as our dependent variable, but use total emissions and include population size as a further explanatory variable. The traditional EKC framework implicitly assumes a population elasticity of one (., population is only a scale factor), which is of course only one possibility and may conflict with reality. Instead, our aim is to estimate this elasticity. Equation (4) therefore represents the more general estimation framework compared to the traditional EKC methodology. Second, contrary to some EKC studies we do not.
