• Energy Research

European Union Directive 2009/28/EC established that the share of renewable energy in the final energy consumption should reach a target of 20% by 2020 in European Union (EU) countries. This study analyses the tendency of this share using data for EU 28, taken from the Eurostat database for the period 1995–2016. First, after a brief statistical and economic analysis of the three macroeconomic indicators at EU level, five regression models (polynomial, ARIMA) were used to estimate the evolution of the share of renewable energy consumption into the final energy consumption, all of them showing an increasing trend for this indicator. The positive impact of the EU Directive in increasing this share was proved by means of a perturbed regression model. Forecasts of this share for the 2020 horizon were obtained, all showing that the EU target is yet to be reached. Secondly, four groups of EU-countries were considered, according to the final energy consumption. Empirical estimations of renewable energy share into the final energy consumption showed increasing trend for all groups, while providing forecasts quite different from the EU ones. Also, economic interpretations of the results are performed.

This study analyses the relationship between per capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, gross domestic product, gross inland energy consumption, and renewable energy consumption for a panel of 28 countries of European Union in the period 1990–2016. Two theoretical models, a quadratic and a cubic one, are used to estimate the shape of the environmental curve and to test the Kuznets hypothesis. The panel cointegration approach proved the existence of long-run equilibrium relations among the four macroeconomic indicators. Empirical estimations, using panel data techniques, as well as heterogeneous regression for each individual country in the panel, show non-conclusive evidence for the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis. The least square estimates, with the variables in log per capita form, reveal that the inverted U-shaped EKC hypothesis is verified for the panel and for 17 of the 28 EU countries. Estimates of the cubic model show that the environmental curve has an inverted N-shaped form. These results do not hold when the values are in non-logarithmic form. In addition, the estimations for all models show that an increase of gross energy consumption leads to an increase of GHGs, while an increase of renewable energy consumption leads to a reduction in GHG emissions.

This study examines the causal relationship between economic growth and renewable energy consumption using data for 28 countries of European Union, taken from Eurostat database for years from 1995 to 2015. In addition, motivated by EU Directive 2009/28/EC, the tendency of the share of renewable energy consumption into the final energy consumption is analysed. Various panel data techniques implemented in EViews are used. The empirical results suggest a positive impact of renewable energy consumption on economic growth, and emphasize bidirectional or unidirectional Granger causalities between the two macroeconomic indicators, for each country in the panel. These results justify the political decisions of EU concerning the necessity of increasing the renewable energy consumption, and prove that this type of energy consumption has a strong positive impact on economic growth. Thus, the inclusion of such policies in future EU and national strategies is further motivated. Finally, by means of linear regression, an increasing trend was found for the ratio between renewable energy consumption and final energy consumption for all but one of the EU countries.

This paper analyzes the evolution and influence of gross domestic product per capita, labor force participation rate, gross fixed capital formation, and personal remittances on economic growth for European Union (EU) countries, using data from the World Bank (1996–2019) and from Eurostat (the first two quarters 2019–2020). The study has three components: statistical analysis, analysis of the evolution for each country and EU, and estimation of the impact on economic growth rate by using a linear multifactorial regression model for 1996–2019, 1996–2008, and 2009–2019. The model was validated by econometric techniques. The long-term causal relationship between exogenous and endogenous variables was validated by the Granger test. The results of the study show a differentiated evolution of the indicators, and that all indicators are severely affected by the 2008 financial crisis and the debut of the COVID-19 crisis in early 2020. The model used shows the significant positive influence of labor and investment, and the minor effect of remittances on economic growth. In the context of the COVID-19 epidemic, the results of the study could be arguments to be considered for the redesign of economic policies at European Union level.

The energy crisis caused first by the COVID-19 pandemic and continued by the Russo-Ukrainian War has demonstrated that energy is a determining factor in the conduct of activities of any state. Several studies have examined the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth, developing various theories, but there is no consensus. This study investigates relationships by analyzing several regression models and choosing the fittest. Then, the verification of its validity is performed through the neural network, which gives greater credibility to the results obtained. Furthermore, using a structural analysis, the investigation is expanded to ranking the impact of sector-specific energy consumption on economic growth. The research includes data from 1995 to 2020 for the European Union (EU) and Romania. The results indicate that short-term energy consumption can have a positive or negative impact on economic growth, both in the EU and Romania. The structural analysis highlights the direct and indirect effects, with different intensities, of sector-specific energy consumption on economic growth. This study is interested primarily in the conditions of uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian War, to enable the EU and each member state to take effective energy policy measures to ensure their energy security.

This paper analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on economic growth and electricity consumption and investigates the hypothesis of the influence of this consumption on the gross domestic product (GDP) for Romania. Using time series on monthly electricity consumption and quarterly GDP and a multi-linear regression model, we performed an analysis of the evolution of these indicators for 2007–2020, a comparison between their behavior during the financial crisis vs. COVID-19 crisis, and empirically explore the relationships between GDP and electricity consumption or some of its components. The results of the analysis confirm that the shock of declining activity due to the COVID-19 pandemic had a severe negative impact on electric energy consumption and GDP in the first half of 2020, followed by a slight recovery. By using a linear regression model, long-term relationships between GDP and domestic and non-household electricity consumptions were found. The empirically estimated elasticity coefficients confirm the more important impact of non-household electricity consumption on GDP compared to the one of domestic electricity consumption. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the results of the study could be useful for optimizing energy and economic growth policies at the national and European levels.

In this paper we study the evolution of remittances and risk of poverty threshold for nine emerging countries in the European Union and analyzed the evolution and trend of the share of remittances in the risk of poverty threshold. The analysis was performed on data taken from the Eurostat database for the period 2005–2017. The statistical analysis of the data showed that the evolution of both remittances and risk of poverty threshold was heavily influenced by the global economic crisis. Although after the crisis, the risk of poverty threshold has seen a growing trend in all emerging countries, the remittances have experienced sinuous variations, dramatic declines for some of the countries (drastically for Romania and Latvia) and significant increases for others (Hungary). The results of the analysis using time-dependent regression models lead to the conclusion that, although the share of remittances in risk of poverty threshold diminished abruptly after the 2009 economic crisis, in the short term it is expected to maintain a growth trend for most of the analyzed countries (Bulgaria, Czechia, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia), followed downward tendency after 2018 for Bulgaria and Romania, and after 2020 for Hungary and Lithuania. For Latvia and Estonia, both quadratic and cubic models estimate a decreasing evolution.

This study analyzes the use of e-commerce by European Union enterprises. Based on an analysis of the evolution of the percentage of enterprises that perform e-commerce and the share of total turnover obtained from e-commerce, for the period of 2003–2020, a forecast for 2025 was made. These aspects were analyzed for 2015–2020 from the perspective of the Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), highlighting the importance of e-commerce in the economic growth of each country by analyzing the share of gross domestic product (GDP) obtained from e-commerce in GDP. For studying the evolution of the indicators, a comparative analysis of the situation of individual and aggregate EU countries was performed, highlighting the evolution trends and determining the annual average growth rate indicator, used later for the short-term forecast. For the 2025 forecast, six regression models were used for the empirical estimation of the data. The results of the analysis show that the share of companies performing e-commerce and the turnover in e-sales vary significantly depending on the size of enterprises, and the results of the forecast estimate that by 2025 there will be a significant increase in e-commerce in most European countries.