Transcript RELATIONS BETWEEN TRANSPORT SYSTEM AND LIFE QUALITY

Environmental Kuznets Curve
in Road Transport
IAASAT CONFERENCE
Saint Malo & Mont Saint-Michel, France, April 2-4, 2012
Zdenek Riha, Marek Honcu
Czech Technical Univerity, Faculty of Transportation Sciences
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 chances
Liveability of
environment
Life-ability of the
person
Life results
Utility of life
Appreciation 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)
RELATIONS BETWEEN TRANSPORT
SYSTEM AND LIFE QUALITY
Relations Between Transport System And Life Quality
INNER QUALITY
OF TRANSPORT SYSTEM
GDP FACTOR
TRANSPORT SYSTEM
LIFE QUALITY
EXTERNALITIES
EXTERNAL COSTS
EXTERNAL BENEFITS
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):
Gini index
% INCOME
GINI index 
„Ideal“
Lorentz Curve
area B
area A  area B
AREA B
Really curve
of income
dividing
The creating of midlle class – Gini index is
decreasing
AREA A
GDP
% POPULATION
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.
Environment
al Decay
2
3
zit   0  1 yit   2 yit   3 yit    X it   it
Turning Point
Income
Where:
Environment
al
Improvement
Deterioration
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)
Per Capita
Income
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)
X  e    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
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.
Thank you for your attention,
Zdeněk ŘÍHA
[email protected]