On the Road to a Green Economy: How Do European Union Countries ‘Do Their Homework’?

Armand Kasztelan
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Armand Kasztelan: Department of Economics and Agribusiness, University of Life Sciences in Lublin, Akademicka 13, 20-950 Lublin, Poland

Energies, 2021, vol. 14, issue 18, 1-16

Abstract: Multidimensional crisis phenomena (financial–economic, environmental and social), plaguing the international community, especially in the last 30 years, have intensified resentment towards traditional models of growth and socio-economic development. The European Commission has placed the idea of a green economy ( GE ) at the heart of the Europe 2020 strategy. This paper presents an assessment of the implementation of the green economy assumptions in EU countries in 2018, taking 2010 as the base year. Using taxonomic methods, a synthetic evaluation index ( GEI—Green Economy Index ) was constructed based on a multi-criterion set of 27 indicators. This paper attempts to answer the following questions: How green are the European economies? What are the main challenges in this context? The average value of the index for the EU countries decreased in the studied years from 0.3423 to 0.3294, which can be interpreted as a slowdown in the greening processes. The key recommendations for the upcoming years include the improvement of energy efficiency indicators, the further increase in the share of renewable energy sources in the energy balance. Moreover, a significant problem continues to be the high percentage of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion, as well as low CO 2 and resource productivity rates.

Keywords: green economy; sustainable development; taxonomic methods; zero unitarisation method; synthetic index; EU countries; indicators; comparative analysis; ranking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

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