Agnolucci, P;
Flachenecker, F;
Söderberg, M;
(2017)
The causal impact of economic growth on material use in Europe.
Journal of Environmental Economics and Policy
10.1080/21606544.2017.1325780.
(In press).
Preview |
Text
The causal impact of economic growth on material use in Europe.pdf - Published Version Download (795kB) | Preview |
Abstract
Several scholars and policy-makers have claimed that Europe, and Western Europe in particular, has managed to ‘decouple’ economic growth from material use. We identify and address one major limitation in the existing literature – failure to take the endogeneity of economic growth into account. Based on a panel data-set of 32 European countries from 2000 to 2014, we estimate the causal impact of gross domestic product (GDP) on domestic material consumption (DMC) applying an instrumental variable approach. We use the number of storm occurrences as an instrument for GDP, which we show is both relevant and valid. Our results provide new evidence that increasing the GDP growth rate causes the DMC growth rate to increase for Western Europe, whereas the effect is insignificant for the Eastern European economies and Europe as a whole. As our results partly question current wisdom on the achievements of ‘decoupling’, especially among European policy-makers, we offer two explanations that are consistent with these results.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The causal impact of economic growth on material use in Europe |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1080/21606544.2017.1325780 |
| Publisher version: | http://doi.org/10.1080/21606544.2017.1325780 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| Keywords: | Decoupling, domestic material consumption, economic growth, instrument, storm |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of the Built Environment > Bartlett School Env, Energy and Resources |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10025110 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
