Department of Social Science, University of Stavanger, Norway.
School of Banking, University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Viet Nam.
J Environ Manage. 2020 Apr 15;260:110143. doi: 10.1016/j.jenvman.2020.110143. Epub 2020 Jan 21.
This paper examines the short-run and long-run effects of economic, sociological and energy factors on environmental degradation in 28 European countries. In so doing, we employ Panel Vector Autoregressive (PVAR) and Fully Modified OLS (FMOLS) approaches on data from 1990 to 2014 in a STIRPAT (Stochastic Impacts by Regression on Population, Affluence, and Technology) framework. Key empirical results indicate that these factors may contribute to environmental improvement in the short run; however, there are adverse implications in the long-run. Specifically, economic factors including economic growth, trade openness and foreign direct investment cause environmental degradation in the under-analysis economies. The sociological factors as measured by the population growth and the level of urbanization also show a negative impact on the environmental degradation in the short-run but in the long run, both population size and urbanization increase environmental degradation. These findings are in line with the concerns raised by Thomas Robert Malthus in his Essay on the Principle of Population. With regards to the energy factors, it indicates that the renewable energies help the European environment by reducing the level of carbon dioxide emissions whereas the higher energy intensity is an ecological threat. Our results remain robust in the EKC framework.
本文考察了经济、社会学和能源因素对 28 个欧洲国家环境退化的短期和长期影响。为此，我们在 1990 年至 2014 年期间采用面板向量自回归（PVAR）和全修正最小二乘法（FMOLS）方法，并在 STIRPAT（基于人口、富裕程度和技术的随机影响回归）框架下对数据进行了研究。主要的实证结果表明，这些因素可能在短期内有助于环境改善，但从长期来看则会产生不利影响。具体而言，经济增长、贸易开放度和外国直接投资等经济因素导致分析中的经济体环境退化。人口增长和城市化水平等社会学因素在短期内对环境退化也有负面影响，但从长期来看，人口规模和城市化水平都会加剧环境退化。这些发现与托马斯·罗伯特·马尔萨斯在《人口论》中提出的担忧是一致的。关于能源因素，研究表明可再生能源通过减少二氧化碳排放有助于改善欧洲环境，而较高的能源强度则是一种生态威胁。我们的结果在 EKC 框架下仍然稳健。
