IAASAT CONFERENCESaint Malo & Mont Saint-Michel, France, April 2-4, 2012
Zdenek Riha, Marek HoncuCzech Technical Univerity, Faculty of Transportation Sciences
Environmental Kuznets Curve
in Road Transport
INTRODUCTION
• The transport system has a strong relationship to life quality and above all to environmental problems
• Models of life quality – for example Maslow (pyramid) or Veenhoven (2006):
• There is problem with soft factors of life quality
Four qualities of life
Outer qualities Inner qualities
Life chancesLiveability of environment
Life-ability of the person
Life results Utility of lifeAppreciation of
life
RELATION BETWEEN TRANSPORT SYSTEM AND LIFE QUALITY
• From the indicated approach it unambiguously follows (and other models would confirm it) that the influence of economic factors and other hard ones will be limited and the life quality will be affected by many other, subjective impacts.
• From the viewpoint of the transport system the link to the first quadrant will be interesting – thus how the transport system influences the environment that afterwards affects the life quality.
• Influence of:
– inner quality of transport
– externalities
– economic output (GDP)
TRANSPORT SYSTEM
GDP FACTOR
EXTERNALITIES
LIFE QUALITY
EXTERNAL COSTS EXTERNAL BENEFITS
INNER QUALITYOF TRANSPORT SYSTEM
RELATIONS BETWEEN TRANSPORT SYSTEM AND LIFE QUALITY
Relations Between Transport System And Life Quality
KUZNETS CURVE
• Simon Kuznets – american economist of russian parentage• He was focused on problems of measurement of economic
output • Kuznets Curve is relation between GDP and unequal income
(by Gini index):% INCOME
% POPULATION
„Ideal“ Lorentz Curve
Really curve of income dividing
AREA B
AREA A
B area A area
B areaindex GINI
The creating of midlle class – Gini index is decreasing
Gini index
GDP
ENVIRONMENTAL KUZNETS CURVE
• The environmental Kuznets curve was introduced by the economists Grossman and Krueger.
• It states that the environment begins to improve with the growth of GDP per capita, as e.g. better technologies start to be used after some level of welfare had been reached.
Per Capita Income
Deterioration
Environmental Decay
Turning Point Income
Environmental
Improvement
ititXityityityitz 33
2210
Where:
emissions per capita zit in locality i at time t, coefficients βi, independent variable average GDP per capita yit, other explaining factors Xit and error term εit
(Grossman & Krueger, 1995)
REASONS FOR EKC
• The transition from agricultural character of the society to the industrial one during the industrial revolution was followed by the increased environmental deterioration
• The decreasing shape of the EKC can be explained by technological changes. Innovation has usually been decreasing the energy consumption rate as well as emission factors
• The demand for better environment has been increasing with the growing wealth
• More wealthy society has been asserting through its public representatives more strict environmental legislation
• The last reason relates to the transfer of production to poorer countries with lower labour cost
VERIFICATION OF EKC
• For the verification of the EKC in road transport we have analysed the emissions as function of the GDP of 16 countries of the European Union:
• Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia,
• Belgium, France, Germany, Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Sweden and United Kingdom
CONCLUSIONS
• The relation beetwen carbon dioxide emissions and global warming is problematic
• X=f(GDP)
• with total emissions X, emission factor of transport energy consumption e, road transport energy intensity of GDP ρ
• Carbon dioxide emissions show in general (regardless the source activity) a strong linear correlation with GDP
GDPeX
CONCLUSIONS
The situation of emissions of nitrogen oxides is more interesting. A final regression
with a quadratic function was used that corresponds to the theoretical shape of the
EKC.
CONCLUSIONS
• Our data show that except for carbon dioxide, the emissions per capita from road transport decrease with the growing GDP per capita, i.e. the environmental Kuznets curve could be valid for the emissions from road transport.
• According to our simple analysis the explanation could be only the successful control of emissions, e.g. by the EURO standards.
• Other factors like lower consumption vehicles, better transport technologies etc. seem not to contribute at the total to this decrease, because the road transport energy intensity of GDP seems to be constant.
