Economic Growth and Air Pollution in Metropolitan Cities of Nigeria

Abstract

There is an increasing consensus that environmental pollution has an inverted-U relationship with economic development. That is, economic development may initially lead to increased pollution but eventually bring about cleaner environment, hypothesis was also analyzed in studies using regional data within a country, and the air pollution data are from the 1999 Annual Report of Ambient Air Quality in Nigeria by the Ministry of Environment. The reason is that many of the observations are not available and are highly unreliable, mainly because those are the early years of pollution monitoring using receptors for the first time. The six metropolitan cities have 57 observation sites over 31 local districts. The results show that carbon monoxide (CO) and total suspended particulates (TSP) had inverted-U relationship with city income. The same kind of relationship, however, was not found in sulphur dioxide (SO), 2 nitrogen dioxide (NO ) and ozone (O ), it also show that SO , NO , TSP and CO have inverted-U 2 3 2 2 relationships with regional income. Turning points estimated in this paper are lower than some other particular cities of Nigeria, they estimated about 10 million won and 13 million won for SO and NO 2 2, respectively. However, the air quality data investigated in this paper are qualitatively different. Many researchers in the field of urbanair pollution report that the estimated turning points tend to be lower for the concentration data than for the emission data