Abstract
The tendency of depletion of non-renewable resources and the environment’s continuous degradation have been considered in the last centuries acceptable as side effects for achieving the economic growth and satisfying the human needs in the conditions of demographic growth following an upward trend. An adequate response to all these challenges is related to increasing the share of green GDP in total GDP, to green procurement and to the large-scale promotion of circular economy. At EU level, there are appropriate legislation and programs and packages aimed at implementing green procurement and the circular economy. There are also prize-winner countries that have adopted National Green Procurement Plans before they became mandatory, countries that have found it harder to adopt this type of plans, but also countries that have not adopted National Green Procurement Plans such as Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg and Romania. The article focuses on an analysis of the impact of national green procurement plans adoption on circular economy in the European Union member states for the period 2007-2018, with the help of an unrestricted VAR panel (PVAR), based on three hypotheses according to which the impact of these plans’ adoption is positive on economic growth, CO2 emissions and circular economy. Data taken from Eurostat and processed using E-Views 9 econometric software allowed the validation of research hypotheses, confirming the positive impact of the adoption and implementation of green procurement national plans on some significant indicators characterizing the circular economy, which is likely to encourage the generalization of concerns regarding the adoption of coherent public policies in all Member States.
Highlights
Accelerated exploitation of fossil resources given the limited nature of natural resources, demographic growth and the increased need for energy and food resources, continuous degradation of the environment and the triggering, not randomly, of phenomena such as: defrosting of the ice cap, frequent forest fires of unprecedented intensity or amplification of extreme weather phenomena, are just a few of the huge challenges that have raised serious questions about the traditional model of economic growth and have led to concerns about green GDP and circular economy
Hypothesis H1 is confirmed in the sense that the impact of green procurement plans adoption on the economic growth is a positive and, at the same time, sustainable one as can be seen in Figure no. 1, which confirms the results of previous studies (Hamilton, 1994; Wong et al, 2008; Testa et al, 2016; Cheng et al, 2018), as opposed to the results of the comparative studies conducted by Kendrick in 1981
The results of this study confirm that the states which have adopted national green procurement plans have achieved both economic growth and reduction of the waste amount, as well as an increase of the quantity of recycled materials, whereas for the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions the introduction of these plans has proven to be a necessary but not sufficient condition, given this phenomenon’s magnitude
Summary
Accelerated exploitation of fossil resources given the limited nature of natural resources, demographic growth and the increased need for energy and food resources, continuous degradation of the environment and the triggering, not randomly, of phenomena such as: defrosting of the ice cap, frequent forest fires of unprecedented intensity or amplification of extreme weather phenomena, are just a few of the huge challenges that have raised serious questions about the traditional model of economic growth and have led to concerns about green GDP and circular economy. GDP "refers to the aggregate market value of all final goods and services produced in a country in a given period of time, usually one year" (Avram, 2012). As green GDP share in total GDP increases, green procurement grows, respectively those "goods and services with a reduced impact on the environment throughout their entire lifecycle" (Neubauer et al, 2017). The national green procurement plans began to be adopted based on the European Union's integrated policy on Environmental Life - Cycle Thinking (COM (2003) 0302 final), the first country to adopt a national green procurement plan being the Netherlands in 2003, followed by France in 2007 and Germany, Italy and Spain in 2008. Most countries have adopted national plans, gradually until 2017, with the exception of Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg and Romania, which have not yet adopted these green procurement plans
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