The Impact Of EU Economic Growth On Carbon Emissions

With the rapid growing of the world economy and the improving of productivity,the demand for the natural resources has been continuously increasing,which has caused a series of damages such as melting of glaciers and rising sea levels and posed threats to human living space.The environmental issues have gradually become the focus of governments and the public.Therefore,it’s time to have an indepth research on the main economic influence of carbon emissions and find targeted ways to improve various influencing factors,which can help us control and continuously reduce greenhouse gas emissions and develop low-carbon economy characterized by low energy consumption,low emissions and high outputs.The EU plays the role of an advocate and lead in global climate governance.The development and utilization of renewable energy are in the lead and the EU has the world’s largest and most mature carbon emissions trading market and introduced some supporting measures such as an energy labeling system and hotspot coproduction,making the EU continuously reduce carbon emissions.This paper takes the EU as the research object and follows the common research ideas which begins at the mechanism analysis,followed by model construction and conduct the empirical research.The article mainly concludes:Firstly,it explains the relevant theoretical basis and the impact mechanism of economic growth.Secondly,it describes the present status of the EU’s economic growth and carbon emissions from 1995 to 2018.Thirdly,according to the environmental impact model(IPAT)and related literature,5 economic factors are selected to build an extended STIRPAT model.The factors of population and technology are added as control variables.Finally,it makes a regression analysis on the panel data of 27 EU countries to explore the impact of economic growth on carbon emissions.The results of the study show that from 1995 to 2018,although EU’s economy has been growing,its carbon emissions were significantly reduced.At the same time,the industrial structure and energy structure continue to improve,which shows EU has well controlled the increase of carbon emission in the process of economic growth.Based on the static panel data regression of EU 27 countries,it draws a conclusion that GDP per capita mainly causes carbon emissions increase.In the process of the growth of the economy,the higher ratio of fossil energy in the total consumption is,the more carbon emissions will emit.The foreign trade dependency and FDI’s impact on carbon emissions are small.Developing service industry is conductive to cut down the carbon emissions.Two-step system-GMM is used for dynamic panel data regression to eliminate the endogeneity and the result is similar to that of static regression.Economic growth will significantly increase carbon emissions,while the reduction of fossil energy and the development of service industry will promote carbon emissions.The last chapter analyzes the impact mechanism of EU economic growth on carbon emissions and proves that economic growth will affect carbon emissions through four intermediary variables: FDI,foreign trade,industrial structure,and energy structure.Finally,it points that when chasing economic growth,we need to cut down the energy intensity,expand the proportion of clean energy utilization,expand the proportion of modern service industry in GDP,upgrade the structure of FDI and international trade and so on,which will promote carbon emissions reduction and achieve the goal of carbon peaking by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2060.