RELATIONSHIP OF PER CAPITA GROSS DOMESTIC PRODUCT TO ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION: AN APPLICATION IN LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES

Abstract

Among the most relevant concerns of human beings nowadays is that of gas emissions, especially carbon dioxide emissions in
developed and underdeveloped countries, authors such as Ghazvini, Dehghani Madvar, Ahmadi, Rezaei, El Haj Assad,
Nabipour, and Kumar, R. (2020) argue that CO2 emissions related to energy are considered one of the most crucial problems
and are rapidly increasing due to increased urbanization. It is important to highlight that different countries have
enacted environmental regulations that generate a positive impact on development and ecological sustainability, but these
regulations must be applied efficiently, it is of vital importance that political institutions play a leading role in the formulation
and management of environmental regulations. Therefore, the following article aims to analyze the relationship of the Gross
Domestic Product Per capita with environmental conservation, in Latin America, taking into account that its participation in the
world economy according to data from ECLAC (2018) represents 8% of the Global GDP of the world population and we
contribute to environmental degradation. For the development of this study, the Kuznets Environmental Curve was used, which
allows generating a relationship between GDP per capita and CO2 emissions. The data used corresponds to 27 economies:
Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Grenada, Guatemala,
Guyana, Honduras, Haiti, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Paraguay, El Salvador, Suriname, Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines. This allows the generation of hypotheses based on the relationship between monetary amounts and
the effect of a set of implications that arise as a result of the use of natural resources (Mosconi, et al. 2020), which may present
the low efficiency of the processes. Among the most relevant findings, it can be concluded that the behavior of carbon dioxide
emissions is closely related to the GDP per capita, indicating that the general Latin American income is based on environmental
exploitation, agriculture and invasive livestock farming.