How do Slums Change the Relationship between Urbanization and the Carbon Intensity of Well-being?
Date
2017-12
Authors
McGee, Julius Alexander
Ergas, Christina
Greiner, Patrick
Clement, Matthew Thomas
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Abstract
This study examines how the relationship between urbanization (measured as the percentage of total population living in urban areas) and the carbon intensity of well-being (CIWB) (measured as a ratio of carbon dioxide emissions and life expectancy) in most nations from 1960-2013 varies based on the economic context and whereabouts of a substantial portion of a nation's urban population. To accomplish this, we use the United Nations' (UN) definition of slum households to identify developing countries that have substantial slum populations, and estimate a Prais-Winsten regression model with panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE), allowing for disturbances that are heteroskedastic and contemporaneously correlated across panels. Our findings indicate that the rate of increase in CIWB for countries without substantial slum populations begins to slow down at higher levels of urbanization, however, the association between urbanization and CIWB is much smaller in countries with substantial slum populations. Overall, while urbanization is associated with increases in CIWB, the relationship between urban development and CIWB is vastly different in developed nations without slums than in under-developed nations with slums.
Description
Keywords
slums, urbanization, carbon intensity of well-being, urban development, Sociology
Citation
McGee, J. A., Ergas, C., Greiner, P. T., & Clement, M. T. (2017). How do slums change the relationship between urbanization and the carbon intensity of well-being? PLoS ONE, 12(12).
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
© 2017 McGee et al.
© 2017 McGee et al.