The Impact of GDP Growth on CO2 Emissions: Testing Environment Kuznets Curve for the Case of Ukraine

The paper studies the presence of a quadratic relationship between GDP growth and CO2 emissions. It tests the Environment Kuznets Curve, which assumes that at the development stage increase of countries income led to corresponding growth of CO2 emissions. However, at a certain point, society becomes sustainable and with an increase in income, CO2 emissions began to decay. We test the hypothesis using data on regions level during the 2006-2019 and come to the conclusion that Ukraine is still not on the sustainable path and the relationship between GDP and CO2 is U-shaped. Moreover, we got a result showing the uneven distribution of environmental pollution between regions. This makes it possible to formulate the necessary conclusions regarding allocation of budget collected from environment fees.