Improvement without Convergence: Pressure on the Environment in European Union Countries[Note 1. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for ...]

This short research note addresses a topic that has been neglected in the literature so far. The topic is whether and to what extent pressure on the environment in the 15 countries that currently form the European Union (EU) has decreased and, more interestingly, whether this pressure has converged among these countries. Convergence is defined here as a narrowing of the variation in the pressure among the relevant countries. Why would one expect decreasing pressure on the environment in EU countries? The answer lies in a combination of policy and economics. On the policy side, increasingly stringent environmental regulations at both the national and the Community level should lead to reduced pressure. To appreciate the changes in policies, compare the situation in the early and mid1980s, the starting point of the empirical evidence reported further below, with the one in the mid-1990s, the end period of this evidence. In the early 1980s, many of the countries that now form the EU, even the pioneering ones, had just Improvement without Convergence: Pressure on the Environment in European Union Countries*