The impact of agriculture and renewable energy on climate change in Central and East European Countries

Abstract

According to the objectives of the European Union concerning the climate changes, Member States should take all the necessary measures in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. The aim of this study is to identify the causality relations between greenhouse gases emissions, added value from agriculture, renewable energy consumption, and economic growth based on a panel consisting of 11 states from the Central and Eastern Europe (CEECs) in the period between 2000 and 2017. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) method was used to estimate the long-term relationships among the variables. Also a Granger causality test based on the ARDL - Error Correction Model (ECM) and a Pairwise Granger causality test were used to identify the causality relationship and to detect the direction of causality among the variables. The results obtained reveal, in the long term, two bidirectional relationships between agriculture and economic growth and two unidirectional relationships from agriculture to greenhouse gas emissions and renewable energy. In the short term, four unidirectional relationships were found from agriculture to all the variables in the model and one unidirectional relationship from renewable energy to greenhouse gas emissions.

Keywords

• autoregressive distributed lag model
• environmental kuznets curve theory
• greenhouse gas emissions
• gross value added from agriculture