Οικονομική ανάπτυξη, ακτινοβολία και ενεργειακό αποτύπωμα: η επίδραση των θεσμικών παραγόντων

Abstract

This dissertation consists of five chapters and studies the relationship between the economic growth, radiation and the energy imprint in a framework featuring the effect of institutional factors on three levels: national, European and worldwide. The first chapter describes the motives related to the main subject of the PhD Thesis. The second chapter investigates mainly the relationship between the electric power consumption externalities and economic growth in worldwide level. The third chapter examines the relationship between the total cost of services for radioprotection and the health outcomes in regions of Greece and how regions may be affected. The fourth chapter studies the spillovers of a sequence of shocks to the GDP per capita and Ionizing Radiation Therapy Equipment (IRTE) growth. The last chapter contains useful outcomes of all previous chapters. The second chapter studies the possible link between economic growth and electric power consumption externalities in a worldwide framework for 89 countries from the period 1990 to 2014. For this purpose, a spatial econometric approach is supported by the results of several statistical tests on the presence of either a spatially lagged dependent variable and/or spatially lagged residuals. Therefore, geographical and economic effects are examined in order to discover patterns of localization of emissions. The results validate the effect of regional externalities of energy consumption pattern on the GDP growth, using spatial, economic, electric and environmental neighbouring spillovers. The reasoning behind such externalities is basically the consumption or production patterns between countries caused by energy consumption as well as emissions. The externalities compensate the mechanisms of decreasing returns to scale to capital accumulation within each economy. From this observation, it is increasingly imperative establishing a mechanism for an accurate prediction of energy demands that could contribute with useful information for making decisions on energy generation and purchase and would have surely a significant impact on preventing overloading and allowing an efficient energy storage. The third chapter presents spatial hedonic models for environmental hazards and health results. The aim of the chapter is to address the linkages between the total cost of services for radioprotection and the health outcomes in Greece from the period 2010 to 2016 based on a unique dataset of Greek Atomic Energy Commission (EEAE). A spatial analysis is conducted in a hedonic price framework in order to investigate the impact of total service cost Nuts 1 level in Greece. The incorporation of geographical as well as economic and health personnel effects was selected for this study on account on the basis of testing for the existence and magnitude of interregional externalities in conjunction with healthcare expenditure, medical capital investment and examinations MRI. The evidence robustly indicates that the interregional externalities affect regions of economic linkages suggesting strong cross- sectional spillovers than geographical ones. The chapter concludes with the impact segregation of each service for radioprotection, provided by EEAE, to scope out the effect of each one in the total cost services. As anticipated, our findings prove that services for non- ionizing radiation has the strongest influence among the others. The fourth chapter aims to shed light on spillovers due to a sequence of shocks to the GDP per capita and Ionizing Radiation Therapy Equipment growth concerning 15 European countries over the period 2000 - 2014. A recent method focuses on a convergence between a spatial and global vector autoregression model (GVAR). The specific approach was selected in order to measure the spillovers and a sequence of shocks, conditional on model limitations. Interestingly, the analysis from impulse responses depicts different results for IRTE and GDP per capita from financial and technological shocks respectively. The direct effects exert major impact on the growth of these two variables based on the parameters of the spatially lagged variable. The single most striking observation to emerge from indirect effects is not only the positive sign of a financial shock but also the greater magnitude from a technological one. In contradiction with the earlier findings, the significant spill-out effects across variables of IRTE growth shock in other countries are greater than a GDP per capita growth shock.