Q01 - Sustainable DevelopmentNávrat zpět

Unclean energy consumption stimulates carbon footprint (CF) leading to increased environmental pollution. Renewable energy transition (ETN) can curb the CF; however, political risk can obstruct this process. Hence, this study analyses the connections between economic growth, ETN and CF by considering political risk and financial expansion in a panel of top 10 emitters from 1992 to 2020 using the method of moment quantile regressions (MM-QR). The results elucidate that ETN significantly reduces the CF in the top emitters. Thus, expanding the ETN is beneficial for reducing the CF and promoting sustainable development. Improving the political environment by reducing the political risk (POLR) helps curb the CF. The inverted U-shaped connection between CF and economic growth shows that increased growth can reduce CF if top emitters can continue to promote energy transition and political stability. The positive impact of financial expansion on CF becomes insignificant at higher quantiles. Finally, policy suggestions are discussed.

Energy efficiency improvements have become a major hope for decoupling the energy demand from economic growth and for achieving environmental goals. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of policies based on promoting energy efficiency may be undermined by behavioral responses. A more efficiently produced energy service becomes cheaper and economic theory then suggests that consumers should demand more of it, which will cause a loss of the potential technological saving. The phenomenon is called the rebound effect and it has become a focus of energy economists since early 80s. However, even today there is no clear consensus on its importance. Quantification of the rebound effect is mainly hampered by poor data availability and the comparison of results is not straightforward due to methodological differences. Our study concentrates right on the economic theory of the demand for energy services, definitions and their applicability to empirical estimation. It summarizes the state of knowledge and elaborates on plausible models for empirical quantification of the rebound effect which should bear consistent results.

Currently, if speaking about the theoretical background of the environmental policy, most of environmental economists have neoclassical economics in their minds. State regulation of private activities by means of restrictions, commands, taxes and fees is usually seen as the only one way to reach the high quality of the environment. It is believed, that due to market failures market forces are not able to solve the environmental problems. Actually, these are the main arguments for state interventions into the private negotiations about environmental issues. But are these assumptions correct from the methodological point of view? Is the state regulation really the only one way to solve the environmental problems? In this paper we try to signify the main methodological problems of neoclassical economics and to identify, how to solve environmental problems from the point of view of other economic school of thoughts. The development of theoretical aspects of environmental issues was not fetched up in 60's. and 70's with neoclassical conclusions, but it continued in 80's and 90's with free-market-environmentalism. This theoretical background contains the methodology of Austrian school of thoughts, Public Choice theory and new institutional economics. In the present environmental policy, theoretical conclusions of these school of thoughts are (intentionally) marginalized. At the end of this paper we discuss the interdependence between environmental degradation and economic growth. Is the economic growth bad or good for environmental protection? To answer this question we follow the modeling approach.

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate some economywide effects of the adoption of Common Agricultural Policy. The general equilibrium approach is applied. The model is designed as a static computable general equilibrium one. The model structure reflects basic neoclassical assumption, i.e. producers maximize their profit and consumers maximize utility while the government wishes to balance its budget. The scenarios follow the debate about the extent of CAP available for candidate countries. Selected macro and sectoral economic indicators are used to assess the magnitude of scenarios impacts on the national economy. Model simulations indicate that positive aspects of accession prevail over negative ones in the most respects.