Macroeconomic Predictors for Recycling Rate of e-Waste for Romania in the EU-28 Context

Abstract

Circular Economy (CE) is now central to debates and interventions that aim to transition systems towards greater environmental sustainability. Circular economy is part of green economy that includes human well-being, ecosystems resilience, efficiently use of resources and waste management. Romania as member of EU-28 make effort to make transition to green economy and this effort is reflected in macroeconomics indices linked and waste management indices. The aim of our paper is to analyses through statistical methods which macroeconomic index is the best predictor for recycling rate of e-waste for Romania in European context. By using the Eurostat and UNPD data we applied Structural Equation Modelling (SEM), multilinear regression, Pearson correlations, and Student t test. The results of SEM emphasis that for Romania, the best predictors for e-waste management are education level (direct effect) and people at risk of poverty or social exclusion (%), HDI, general government expenditure for environment protection (% in GDP) as indirect effects.

Keywords

• circular economy
• waste management
• e-waste
• hdi
• gdp
• government expenditure
• education
• poverty
• eu28
• romania