Greenhouse Gas Emissions and its Main Drivers: a Panel Assessment for EU-27 Member States

This paper assesses the effects of greenhouse gas emissions drivers in EU-27 over the period 2010-2019, using a Panel EGLS model with period fixed effects. In particular, we focused our research on studying the effects of GDP, renewable energy, households energy consumption and waste on the greenhouse gas emissions. In this regard, we found a positive relationship between three independent variables (real GDP per capita, households final consumption per capita and waste generation per capita) and greenhouse gas emissions per capita, while the effect of the share of renewable energy in gross final energy consumption on the dependent variable proved to be negative, but quite low. In addition, we demonstrate that the main challenge that affects greenhouse gas emissions is related to the structure of households energy consumption, which is generally composed by environmentally harmful fuels. This suggests the need to make greater efforts to support the shift to a green economy based on a higher energy efficiency.