The evaluation of the impact of economic growth on greenhouse gas emissions

The dissertation is devoted to the pressing issue of preserving the environment in the course of economic development of countries. The problem of greenhouse gas emissions (further  GHG) associated with human activities is highlighted as one of the main environmental issues in today’s world, which requires an immediate reaction and behavioural changes. The European Union is the leading region in tackling problem, and the reduction of GHG by 20 percent is explicitly introduced in European strategy 2020. In this context, there is a scientific debate how economic growth and the related processes and phenomena affect the environmental quality indicators.  At the scientific level, there is a lack of different tools, allowing for evaluating the harmful effect of economic growth on environmental quality indicators, as well as for assessing the socio – economic and environmental policies. In the academic world, the centre of this discussion was so called the environmental Kuznets curve (further – EKC), representing the relationship between various environmental indicators and economic growth as the inverted-U trajectory. The technique and the model proposed by the author can be the instrument for assessing the impact of the economic growth and related factors, helping to reduce the height of the EKC, on GHG emissions and modelling various scenarios.

The dissertation consists of an introduction, three chapters, conclusions and annexes.

In Chapter 1, the state of the present investigation of the environmental Kuznets curve is considered, a critical overview of the empirical research is provided and the classification of relevant factors is presented.

In Chapter 2, the sequence of the evaluation of the impact of economic growth on GHG, including the reduced form model and the model, capturing some specific additional factors, such as the economic structure, research and development expenditure, environmental taxes, energy taxes  and sustainable business, is described.

In Chapter 3, the empirical analysis of the evaluation of the impact of economic growth on GHG based on the proposed model, which was made for the selected European countries in the period of 1995–2011, is presented as well as three scenarios, showing the impact of economic growth and other special factors on the level of GHG, are modelled.

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.20334/2259-M