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• The figures shall help shedding some light on the relationship between wealth (measured by a countries per capita GDP) and different measures of pollution.

• Overall data availability and data quality is not optimal.

Environmental Kuznet curve

The idea of an environmental Kuznet curve is that pollution may first go up when poor countries get richer but once countries are sufficiently rich to spend more money on environmental protection it may go down again.

• Across country, the figures do not show very clear environmental Kuznet curves. There is a lot of heterogeniety.

• Also look at the time dynamics, by adding trails. You see like some countries as China grow and get more PM2.5 air pollution, while already richer European countries grow and get cleaner air at the same time.

Note: The variable population is the square root of the actual population to make bubbles more of an equal size.