Air pollution and tourism growth relationship: exploring regional dynamics in five European countries through an EKC model.

The present study intends to explore the relationship between tourism growth and air pollution at a regional level for five important tourism European destinations: France, Spain, Greece, Portugal, and Italy. Most of the studies found in the literature examine this relationship on a national scale and focus only on the CO pollutant, which is a greenhouse gas but not a critical pollutant in terms of air quality and human exposure. This research focuses on a regional basis (NUTS 2 classification) and takes into account the main critical pollutants in terms of urban air pollution (namely: NOx, PM10, and PM2.

Drivers of the Green Paradox in Europe: An empirical application.

The green paradox describes an undesirable and socially inefficient phenomenon caused by the expansionary reactions of the supply as a response to the various mechanisms that combat climate change. This article seeks to understand and aggregate the different drivers of this phenomenon portrayed in the literature, as well the empirical evidence associated and the proposed solutions. For this purpose, compilation and systematization of the various scientific contributions up to date in this context have been elaborated and the driver's effective impact on the European scenario was evaluated, using a balanced panel for 28 countries in Europe over 1996-2018 and the generalized method of moments (GMM) econometric procedure.

The Effectiveness of Environmental Taxes in Reducing CO Emissions in Passenger Vehicles: The Case of Mediterranean Countries.

The transport sector is the biggest source of CO emissions in Europe. It is responsible for over a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions. Passenger vehicles, alone, account for nearly 41% of these emissions, resulting in human health impacts.

The role of ICT in energy consumption and environment: an empirical investigation of Asian economies with cluster analysis.

The development of societies has led information and communication technology (ICT) to play a gradually important role in people's lives, transforming the way societies and economies function. ICTs are often associated with the path to reducing CO emissions; however, do they lead to that path? Or are they themselves a growing source of energy consumption and emissions? The current study estimates the effect of ICT, trade, economic growth, financial development, and energy consumption on carbon emissions in South and Southeast Asian (SSEA) region for the period of 1990-2014. Moreover, the study also tried to validate the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis between GDP per capita and CO emissions.

Circular economy in plastic waste - Efficiency analysis of European countries.

The way plastics are currently produced, used and disposed does not capture the economic benefits of a more 'circular' approach and is dramatically harming the environment. It is relevant to determine which European countries can be considered more or less efficient in the end-of-life of plastic products processes, what the sources of the inefficiencies are, and how those less efficient countries could improve their performance towards a more circular economy. Although some countries have developed a variety of quantitative indicators, there is scarcity of adequate metrics for performance measurements.

The determinants for a circular economy in Europe.

The circular economy contrasts with the traditional linear economy since it presents a sustainable way both to produce goods and services and to contribute to the development of economies. This paper aims to contribute to a better knowledge of the efficiency of resources productivity, a common indicator to compare how circular economies are, through the estimation of the main determinants for the circular economy in Europe. A systematic analysis and comparison of the performance of all the European Union countries was performed to get further insight into their root causes and to help designing future policies towards a more circular European Union economy.

The effects of deforestation and urbanization on sustainable growth in Asian countries.

This study aims to determine the effects of deforestation, economic growth, and urbanization on carbon dioxide (CO) emissions levels in the South and Southeast Asian (SSEA) regions for the 1990-2014 period. The data was divided into five sub-panels. Three of them are income-based groups (namely low-, middle- and high-income panels), and the remaining two are South and Southeast Asian regions.

Efficiency in the European agricultural sector: environment and resources.

This article intends to compute agriculture technical efficiency scores of 27 European countries during the period 2005-2012, using both data envelopment analysis (DEA) and stochastic frontier analysis (SFA) with a generalized cross-entropy (GCE) approach, for comparison purposes. Afterwards, by using the scores as dependent variable, we apply quantile regressions using a set of possible influencing variables within the agricultural sector able to explain technical efficiency scores. Results allow us to conclude that although DEA and SFA are quite distinguishable methodologies, and despite attained results are different in terms of technical efficiency scores, both are able to identify analogously the worst and better countries.

Advanced scoring method of eco-efficiency in European cities.

This paper analyzes a set of selected German and French cities' performance in terms of the relative behavior of their eco-efficiencies, computed as the ratio of their gross domestic product (GDP) over their CO emissions. For this analysis, eco-efficiency scores of the selected cities are computed using the data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique, taking the eco-efficiencies as outputs, and the inputs being the energy consumption, the population density, the labor productivity, the resource productivity, and the patents per inhabitant. Once DEA results are analyzed, the Malmquist productivity indexes (MPI) are used to assess the time evolution of the technical efficiency, technological efficiency, and productivity of the cities over the window periods 2000 to 2005 and 2005 to 2008.