Since the seminal paper by Grossman and Kruger (1991) there has been considerable academic interest in the relationship between economic development and environmental pollution. Importantly the authors have shown empirically that the link between these follows an inverted U-shaped pattern, now commonly referred to as the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC). This suggests that lower income regions are ‘too poor to be green’, but as countries become richer they will naturally reduce their generation of pollution.
Several recent studies, however, have put the existence and the exact shape of an EKC into question (Stern, 2004). In view of the recent policy developments, resolving this issue seems of particular importance. More precisely, the recent Kyoto Protocol has set reduction targets for pollutant emissions to which developed countries are expected to commit themselves to, but from which developing countries are at the first instance exempt. This would suggest that policymakers are of the view that wealth on its own does not result in a possibly sufficient reduction in pollution, a stance which as of date has not yet been substantiated in the academic literature.
In the aftermath of the recent global financial crisis, economists have been once again forced to think about the long run consequences of short run fluctuations. The conventional wisdom holds that in many developed countries economic activity will remain depressed and unemployment will remain high for several years to come. Such projections have, once again, bolstered the interest of economists in studying the long run consequences of recessions.
Two separate strands of the literature have dealt with this topic both from an aggregate and a micro perspective. The former has analyzed the behavior of unemployment, employment and economic activity and has found that crises, or recessions more generally, leave permanent or long lived scars on economic activity and employment. The latter has focused on how short run fluctuations affect firm dynamics. Our paper is more closely related to the second approach.
Google is one of the largest and most popular Web search engines. It is a tool for finding resources on the World Wide Web. Google can scan web pages to find instances of the keywords that the searcher has entered in the search box. The mission of Google is to “organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It is the largest search engine on the Web that receives over 200 million queries each day through its various services. Google is inspired from the term “Google”, which is a common spelling of ‘Googol’ meaning 10100 (Brin and Page; 2006).
The Internet users today prefer Google as the one-stop searching point. They are imagining their library catalogue and their favourite journals searchable through Google’s search box, which havebeen declared the winner for its simplicity. Surveys after surveys are telling that users are going away from libraries to Google (Sathyanarayana; 2004; p.1). Google has already been established as world’s # 1 search engine. Since its inception, Google is in a process of continuous development of varieties of tools and services for easy retrieval of World’s information. A few such tools and services include Google Directory, Google Image Search, Google News, Google email (Gmail), Google Catalogue Search, etc.
