The driving forces of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions from South Latin American countries and their impacts on t
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The driving forces of energy-related carbon dioxide emissions from South Latin American countries and their impacts on these countries’ process of decoupling Victor Moutinho 1,2 & Renato Santiago 1 & José Alberto Fuinhas 3 & António Cardoso Marques 1 Received: 27 July 2019 / Accepted: 18 March 2020 / Published online: 13 April 2020 # Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract An extensive decomposition analysis was used to research the primary driving forces behind energy-related carbon dioxide emissions per capita for the period 1993 to 2017 in a panel of South American countries. Evidence was found that the effect of per capita renewable productivity was challenging and compromised in South Latin American countries. Decoupling changed from a weak state to a strong decoupling state after the Kyoto protocol. When we remove the renewable productivity per capita effect, the results show that the state of strong decoupling was mainly achieved due to a group of economic drivers, with the negative changes in energy intensity, and in the gross domestic investment, proving to be the most significant contributors to decreasing CO2 emission per capita. Keywords Carbon dioxide emissions per capita . Economic growth per capita . Decoupling effort . Renewable productivity
Introduction Increasing CO2 emissions and the link that this has with the economic activity is an issue that has concerned both economic and environmental researchers for several decades (see, for example the meta-analytic work by Mardani et al. 2019). Although many economic thinkers state that it is unlikely that a country achieves high levels of economic growth without
Responsible editor: Gerhard Lammel * Victor Moutinho [email protected]; [email protected] Renato Santiago [email protected] José Alberto Fuinhas [email protected] António Cardoso Marques [email protected] 1
NECE-UBI and Management and Economics Department, University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal
2
GOVCOPP – UA, Aveiro, Portugal
3
CeBER and NECE-UBI, Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra, Coimbra, Portugal
adverse consequences for its environment, there is a general view that the adverse effects of the production process can be reduced through the increased use of renewable energy sources. Because of this debate, and due to the increased environmental concerns that the world has been facing in the last decades (e.g., climate change), studies on sustainable development are becoming more and more popular/relevant. These studies are primarily focused on answering the question of how countries can achieve good economic results while protecting the environment (e.g. Cohen et al. 2018; Roinioti and Koroneos 2017; de Freitas and Kaneko 2011). Still, it is not just the academics who are interested in this topic and, today, we can find some examples of the growing consciousness of the worldwide governments regarding sustainability and environmental issues. The signings of the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Climate Agreement are some of the
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