How the European Union reaches the target of CO₂ emissions under the Paris Agreement

ABSTRACT

In the future promotion of Paris Agreement, the European Union (EU) has become an object of concern in the world through its own performance at improving energy efficiency and reducing CO₂ emissions. This research collects data from 28 EU countries and Norway from 2010 to 2015 to evaluate their energy and CO₂ emission efficiency through a meta-frontier non-radial directional distance function. Different from previous studies, only considering the individually countries efficiency comparison, this research divides the sample countries into two groups, the group of North-Western European countries and the group of Central-Eastern European countries. The empirical results show that there is a declining trend in the efficiency value of Central-Eastern European countries from 2010 (0.832) to 2015 (0.792), and a significant average technology gap ratio at 0.904. We then compare energy and CO₂ emissions' room for improvements for specific countries and conclude that the Central-Eastern European countries should learn from the management experience of the North-Western European countries. It is an effective way to improve the energy and CO₂ emission performances of EU countries by restricting the transfer of high carbon emissions industries and encouraging the long-term sustainable development of renewable energy.

KEYWORDS:

• Energy and CO₂ emissions efficiency
• technical efficiency gap
• performance improvement
• meta-frontier non-radial directional distance function
• Paris Agreement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.