Vol.:(0123456789) Letters in Spatial and Resource Sciences (2019) 12:41–49 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12076-019-00225-1 1 3 ORIGINAL PAPER The human rights foundations of an EKC with a minimum consumption requirement: theory, implications, and quantitative fndings Chris Jefords 1  · Alexi Thompson 1 Received: 10 July 2018 / Accepted: 18 January 2019 / Published online: 28 January 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Andreoni and Levinson’s (J Public Econ 80:269–286, 2001) EKC model is modifed to include Stone (Econ J 63:511–527, 1954) and Geary (Rev Econ Stud 18(99):65– 66, 1950) preferences where the economic agent has a minimum consumption requirement (MCR). We show that at each level of income, an increase in the MCR is associated with higher levels of pollution, and the threshold level of income at which the EKC inverts changes with a change in the MCR. A numerical exercise further supports these fndings. We ofer a policy discussion within the context of the environmental impacts of meeting a MCR noting that doing so is costly in terms of the impact on pollution and the resources required to mitigate pollution in its presence. Keywords EKC · Minimum standard of living · Pollution · Economic growth 1 Introduction Humans require, at a minimum, a certain quantity of goods and services (e.g., food, clothing, shelter, water, etc.) to function in fully autonomous ways and, perhaps more importantly, to not die prematurely. Consumption requires both economic and environmental resources, where economic growth and environmental quality share a theoretical and empirical relationship in the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). The basic EKC posits that environmental harm is increasing in economic growth, where growth is typically measured by gross domestic product (“income”) per cap- ita. At some threshold standard of living, however, further economic growth is asso- ciated with reductions in environmental harm. The EKC hence refects an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic growth and environmental harm. * Chris Jefords jefords@iup.edu 1 Department of Economics, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 213 McElhaney Hall, 441 North Walk, Indiana, PA 15705, USA