Drivers of the Green Paradox in Europe: An empirical application.

The green paradox describes an undesirable and socially inefficient phenomenon caused by the expansionary reactions of the supply as a response to the various mechanisms that combat climate change. This article seeks to understand and aggregate the different drivers of this phenomenon portrayed in the literature, as well the empirical evidence associated and the proposed solutions. For this purpose, compilation and systematization of the various scientific contributions up to date in this context have been elaborated and the driver's effective impact on the European scenario was evaluated, using a balanced panel for 28 countries in Europe over 1996-2018 and the generalized method of moments (GMM) econometric procedure. Proxies for all provocateurs identified in the state of the art were incorporated in this study: (i) environmental taxes, (ii) green support, (iii) uncertain property rights, (iv) emissions limit (cap), and (v) temporal lag. The dependent variables used are (1) the ratio between the annual production/extraction of oil and the consumption of primary energy and (2) the carbon dioxide (CO2) intensity. We have obtained evidences that the hiatus in the implementation of the European emission cap mechanism has generated a strong green paradox. Moreover, a robust reflection regarding the economic and environmental adequacy of green supports should be considered due to its questionable net benefits. Lastly, we offer some recommendations of public environmental policies that escape the paradoxical phenomenon, through the enunciation of the conditionalities of these provocateurs.

Air pollution and tourism growth relationship: exploring regional dynamics in five European countries through an EKC model.

The present study intends to explore the relationship between tourism growth and air pollution at a regional level for five important tourism European destinations: France, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Italy. Most of the studies found in the literature examine this relationship on a national scale and focus only on the CO2 pollutant, which is a greenhouse gas but not a critical pollutant in terms of air quality and human exposure. This research focuses on a regional basis (NUTS 2 classification) and takes into account the main critical pollutants in terms of urban air pollution (namely: NOx, PM10, and PM2.5), and considers 10 years, from 2009 until 2018. This work aims to investigate evidence of a tourism-induced Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) for the countries through the construction of five panels, one for each country, including different variables: the Gross Domestic Product, the energy consumption, and the number of nights spent at tourist accommodation establishments from both domestic and foreign tourists. The Levin-Lin-Chu unit root test proves the variables to be stationary, while the Pedroni cointegration test shows that they are integrated. The pooled OLS estimator is employed throughout the countries to check the relationship among the variables. Results reveal that the tourism-induced EKC hypothesis is not validated for any of the countries. The findings also show that in Portugal, Italy, and Greece, there is a negative relationship between economic growth and environmental pollution, while mixed evidence is found for France and Spain. Moreover, differences in the impacts of international and domestic tourists on air pollution are found: foreign tourists negatively impact emissions, while domestic ones increase them. This result is clear for Spain, Greece, and Italy. The Granger panel causality test is then conducted to see the causality among the variables.

The Effectiveness of Environmental Taxes in Reducing CO2 Emissions in Passenger Vehicles: The Case of Mediterranean Countries.

The transport sector is the biggest source of CO2 emissions in Europe. It is responsible for over a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. Passenger vehicles, alone, account for nearly 41% of these emissions, resulting in human health impacts. To meet the Paris climate commitments, cars and vans should be decarbonized until 2050. Such a transformation requires general changes, such as how the vehicles are owned, taxed, and driven. The European Federation for Transport and Environment revealed that Mediterranean countries tend to emit less per vehicle compared to the northern and central Europeans. Intriguingly, this does not necessarily correspond to motorization rates. In this article, we assess whether the observed reductions in CO2 emissions in the Mediterranean countries can be attributed to vehicle taxation on CO2 emissions. We apply panel data econometric techniques using data on annual registrations from 2008 to 2018 and model the demand for new-vehicle purchases and their responsiveness to changes in both CO2-based taxation and circulation tax. Our results show the determinants of new-vehicle demand and the change in the emissions rate in each country under the taxation currently adopted. We found that fiscal policies can have an important role in reducing the emission in the Mediterranean countries.

The role of ICT in energy consumption and environment: an empirical investigation of Asian economies with cluster analysis.

The development of societies has led information and communication technology (ICT) to play a gradually important role in people's lives, transforming the way societies and economies function. ICTs are often associated with the path to reducing CO2 emissions; however, do they lead to that path? Or are they themselves a growing source of energy consumption and emissions? The current study estimates the effect of ICT, trade, economic growth, financial development, and energy consumption on carbon emissions in South and Southeast Asian (SSEA) region for the period of 1990-2014. Moreover, the study also tried to validate the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis between GDP per capita and CO2 emissions. Cluster analysis was used to identify two groups (potential and advanced countries) based on their social development score. The long-run connection between the variables was examined and the long-run elasticities of ICT, financial development, energy consumption, trade, and economic growth with respect to CO2 emissions were estimated. Besides, individual country-wise long-run coefficients were found. Results show that financial development and ICT deteriorated the environment quality in the SSEA region, suggesting ICT goods and services are not energy-efficient in both potential and advanced countries and that most of the financial investment was made in non-friendly environmental projects, in potential countries. On the contrary, in advanced countries, financial development mitigates CO2 emissions. In addition, results also confirmed an inverted U-shaped relationship for all the considered three panels such as potential, advance, and full-countries panels, confirming EKC. Causality findings showed a bidirectional causality between CO2 emissions and energy consumption as well as unidirectional causality from trade, economic growth, financial development, and ICT to CO2 emissions. Policymakers should be aware of the ICT impact on energy consumption and strengthen the regulation of their manufacture to facilitate the integration of energy efficiency into user routines. Due to the increasing use of standby mode and Wi-Fi assistive devices, the rapid implementation of legislation regulating these technologies to make them more efficient is recommended.

Circular economy in plastic waste - Efficiency analysis of European countries.

The way plastics are currently produced, used and disposed does not capture the economic benefits of a more 'circular' approach and is dramatically harming the environment. It is relevant to determine which European countries can be considered more or less efficient in the end-of-life of plastic products processes, what the sources of the inefficiencies are, and how those less efficient countries could improve their performance towards a more circular economy. Although some countries have developed a variety of quantitative indicators, there is scarcity of adequate metrics for performance measurements. This paper estimates the efficiency of 26 European countries in the context of Circular Economy, for the period 2006-2016, considering the generation of waste, recovery and recycling of plastic, with a methodology based on the Multidirectional Efficiency Analysis. Apart from identifying the most efficient countries in the studied period, results show that efficiency increases for most countries with time, and that many countries reach the full efficiency by the end of the study period, and especially by 2016. Input analysis shows that increasing capital seems to be a main driver towards efficiency, since the other inputs are used with a similar efficiency by most countries. Output analysis suggest that the difference among countries efficiency is not in their reduction of total waste or emissions, but rather in the improvement of their economic growth in a circular way, that is, improving GDP but also the recovering and recycling activities. These results could be useful to design policies towards a more efficient and circular use of plastics.

The determinants for a circular economy in Europe.

The circular economy contrasts with the traditional linear economy since it presents a sustainable way both to produce goods and services and to contribute to the development of economies. This paper aims to contribute to a better knowledge of the efficiency of resources productivity, a common indicator to compare how circular economies are, through the estimation of the main determinants for the circular economy in Europe. A systematic analysis and comparison of the performance of all the European Union countries was performed to get further insight into their root causes and to help designing future policies towards a more circular European Union economy. With this purpose, a set of determinant factors for a circular economy in Europe were analysed, under the period between 2000 and 2016. A cluster analysis was applied and complemented with three econometric estimation methods: panel unit root tests, panel cointegration tests and vector autoregression model. The main findings allowed to cluster European countries into three different groups according to the growth rate of their resources productivity and to explain them according to the selected exploratory factors. Special efforts were made to explain the highest productivity growth group, as a way to find relevant drivers towards sustainable productivity growths.

The effects of deforestation and urbanization on sustainable growth in Asian countries.

This study aims to determine the effects of deforestation, economic growth, and urbanization on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions levels in the South and Southeast Asian (SSEA) regions for the 1990-2014 period. The data was divided into five sub-panels. Three of them are income-based groups (namely low-, middle- and high-income panels), and the remaining two are South and Southeast Asian regions. The Pedroni cointegration test confirms a long-run relationship between deforestation, economic growth, urbanization, and CO2 emissions in the SSEA regions. Further, empirical results reveal the existence of a U-shaped relationship between CO2 emissions and economic growth for all panels (excepting low-income countries). This means that these countries can grow in a sustainable path, but they must be aware of long-term risks of this economic growth, as this sustainable path could be compromised when reaching the turning point of the "U". Moreover, our results suggest that deforestation and urbanization can aggravate environmental pollution in these regions and can further affect sustainable development in the long run. Besides, the most appropriate and cost-effective method to minimize CO2 emissions is found to be through the improvement of forest activities.

Efficiency in the European agricultural sector: environment and resources.

This article intends to compute agriculture technical efficiency scores of 27 European countries during the period 2005-2012, using both data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) with a generalized cross-entropy (GCE) approach, for comparison purposes. Afterwards, by using the scores as dependent variable, we apply quantile regressions using a set of possible influencing variables within the agricultural sector able to explain technical efficiency scores. Results allow us to conclude that although DEA and SFA are quite distinguishable methodologies, and despite attained results are different in terms of technical efficiency scores, both are able to identify analogously the worst and better countries. They also suggest that it is important to include resources productivity and subsidies in determining technical efficiency due to its positive and significant exerted influence.

Advanced scoring method of eco-efficiency in European cities.

This paper analyzes a set of selected German and French cities' performance in terms of the relative behavior of their eco-efficiencies, computed as the ratio of their gross domestic product (GDP) over their CO2 emissions. For this analysis, eco-efficiency scores of the selected cities are computed using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique, taking the eco-efficiencies as outputs, and the inputs being the energy consumption, the population density, the labor productivity, the resource productivity, and the patents per inhabitant. Once DEA results are analyzed, the Malmquist productivity indexes (MPI) are used to assess the time evolution of the technical efficiency, technological efficiency, and productivity of the cities over the window periods 2000 to 2005 and 2005 to 2008. Some of the main conclusions are that (1) most of the analyzed cities seem to have suboptimal scales, being one of the causes of their inefficiency; (2) there is evidence that high GDP over CO2 emissions does not imply high eco-efficiency scores, meaning that DEA like approaches are useful to complement more simplistic ranking procedures, pointing out potential inefficiencies at the input levels; (3) efficiencies performed worse during the period 2000-2005 than during the period 2005-2008, suggesting the possibility of corrective actions taken during or at the end of the first period but impacting only on the second period, probably due to an increasing environmental awareness of policymakers and governors; and (4) MPI analysis shows a positive technological evolution of all cities, according to the general technological evolution of the reference cities, reflecting a generalized convergence of most cities to their technological frontier and therefore an evolution in the right direction.