Stokey (1998, p. 22), e.

Stokey (1998, p. 22), e.g., states that the optimal regulation problems analyzed here can be interpreted, roughly, as positive models of democratic societies in which income is not too unequally distributed. As many of the countries in the samples for which environmental Kuznets curves have been estimated are neither democratic nor can at best be characterized by an equal income distribution, a motivation for our study is provided. Reasonable to assume that the disutility of pollution is related to the flow of new pollutants and it is thus adequate to use a static model. What are then the predictions of the model?