Greenhouse gas emissions convergence in Spain: evidence from the club clustering approach
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Greenhouse gas emissions convergence in Spain: evidence from the club clustering approach Nicholas Apergis 1 & Antonio J. Garzón 2 Received: 26 November 2019 / Accepted: 24 February 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This study examines the convergence of greenhouse gas emissions per capita across the 19 Spanish regions using the Phillips-Sul club convergence approach over the period spanning from 1990 to 2017. The results indicate the presence of four clubs which converge to different equilibria in emissions per capita and three clubs in terms of income per capita, which involves different regions. These findings suggest that mitigation policies should explicitly consider the presence of different clubs of regions with different convergence paths in terms of emissions and income per capita and address the distributional effect of transfers across regions. Keywords Greenhouse gas emissions . Convergence . Club clustering . Spain
Introduction Greenhouse gases emissions, their impact on climate change and global warming have become one of the main concerns of policymakers over the recent decades, leading countries to the signing of international agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing emissions on the global level. According to such agreements, countries are committed to reduce their emissions primarily through national level measures. This fact implies that they are primarily responsible in designing their own mitigation policies in order to meet specific targets. An important issue for policymakers at national level is the distribution of emissions across regions, as well as their evolution over time. A key question is whether differences in emissions across regions tend to increase or decrease over Responsible Editor: Philippe Garrigues * Nicholas Apergis [email protected] Antonio J. Garzón [email protected] 1
School of Business, Law and Social Sciences, University of Derby, Derby, UK
2
Faculty of Economics and Business Sciences, University of Seville, Seville, Spain
time (Burnett 2016). This issue could affect the design of mitigation policies and the principles used to share the burden of emission reduction across regions. If emissions converge over time, while their overall growth rates decrease, the distributional impact of the mitigation schemes, such as equal per capita allowances, is less concerning for policymakers (Apergis et al. 2017), given that transfers across regions are reduced as they converge to the same level of emissions per capita. However, if differences in emissions tend to increase over time, the mitigation policies could have distributional costs across regions, resulting in increasing transfers of resources or the reallocation of emission-intensive industries. Therefore, policymakers should take explicitly into account such regional differences in the designing of mitigation policies (Burnett 2016; Apergis and Payne 2017), including other indicators beyond the uniform per capita allowances in the emission allocation schemes, such as the ability to
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