Ecology, Inequality, and Poverty: The Case of Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper explores the connections between environmental damages, inequality, and poverty for Bangladesh. Starting with a new concept of national income and its distribution, which takes ecological damages into account, standard measures of poverty and inequality are modified by using the adjusted income distribution for their measurement. Under fairly conservative assumptions of modest environmental damages and a uniform distribution of the damages among the population, it is shown that both inequality and poverty worsen when environmental deterioration is taken into account. From a policy perspective, since there is no inevitable environmental Kuznets curve, developing countries like Bangladesh can enhance the poverty alleviation effects of growth by improving environmental quality through effective interventions.