engleski

What are the main determinants of CO2 emissions? A global evidence

Environmental degradation has become a burning issue today, representing a global threat to all life on Earth by destroying present and future ecosystem. It refers to deterioration in natural environment due to natural disasters and human activities. 𝐶𝑂2 emissions are considered as the most important cause of global warming and climate change. Therefore, they are chosen as a proxy for environmental degradation in this paper. In the paper the determinants of environmental degradation on a global scale, using data for 115 countries worldwide in the period from 1995 to 2015, are investigated. There are many determinants of environmental degradation, mainly from human activity, recognised in the economic literature. In this paper, thirteen macroeconomic variables are chosen as the main determinants of the environmental degradation. These variables are: GDP per capita, trade (in % of GDP), foreign direct investments (FDI), energy use, urban population, total population and population density, gross capital formation, poverty headcount ratio, industry value added (as % of GDP), international tourism as the number of arrivals, renewable electricity output and electricity production from coal sources. The results of the analysis have shown that most of the aforementioned variables have been confirmed to be the determinants of environmental degradation on the global scale, which was a highly expected result according to economic theory. This paper contributes to the existing research in this field by employing up-to-date econometric techniques such as dynamic panel GMM model, Stepwise Least Squares regression and quantile regression. The importance of this econometric techniques is in analysing big data in the case of large N and small T dataset of heterogeneous countries. The main limitation of this paper is related to the missing data for some countries and variables in certain years. The year 2015 was chosen as the last one because it has the most data available. The main findings of this research have practical implications to governments and businesses in order to better understand the economic impact of human activity on the environment.

CO2 emissions ; determinants of environmental degradation ; Stepwise Least Squares regression ; Panel GMM ; quantile regression

Sažetak rada objavljen je i u Book of Abstracts (https://odyssey.net.efzg.hr/book-of-abstracts)