GHG emissions in the EU-28. A multilevel club convergence study of the Emission Trading System and Effort Sharing Decision mechanisms

Abstract

The European Union is engaged in the fight against climate change. A crucial issue to enforce common environmental guidelines is environmental convergence. States converging in environmental variables are expected to be able to jointly develop and implement environmental policies. Convergence in environmental indicators may also help determine the efficiency and speed of those policies. This paper employs a multilevel club convergence approach to analyze convergence in the evolution of GHG emissions among the EU-28 members, on a search for countries transitioning from disequilibrium to specific steady-state positions. Overall convergence is rejected, with club composition depending on the specific period (1990-2017, 2005-2017) and emissions categories (global, ETS, ESD) analyzed. Some countries (e.g. the United Kingdom and Denmark) are consistently located in clubs outperforming the EU's average in terms of speed of emissions reductions, for both the whole and the most recent periods, and for both ETS and ESD emissions. At the other end, Germany (with a large industrial and export basis), Ireland (with the strongest GDP growth in the EU in recent years) and most Eastern EU members underperform after 2005, almost reversing their previous positions when the study begins in 1990.