Analysing the Energy-Economy-Environment Nexus in Agriculture: Applications of Frontier and Index Decomposition Techniques

2017-01-17
Analysing the Energy-Economy-Environment Nexus in Agriculture: Applications of Frontier and Index Decomposition Techniques
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This chapter focuses on analysis of agricultural sustainability from the viewpoint of resource use and efficiency. Indeed, agricultural sector is tightly related to food security goals and, therefore, remains an important economic activity within an economy in spite of the stage of the economic development. However, the increasing considerations of the climate change require modelling and mitigating environmental pressures generated by agricultural and other sectors. In this section, we focus on energy-economy-environment nexus in agriculture by analysing the Dynamics in carbon dioxide emission, energy use, and economic activity (Huisingh et al., 2015; Meyers et al., 2016).

As regards the research framework, the analysis rests on the Index Decomposition Analysis (IDA), decoupling analysis, and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). In particular, much of attention in paid on the analysis of decoupling between resource use and economic growth. The research focuses on a sample of the European Union (EU) Member States. Therefore, decoupling analysis allows to identify the patterns of decoupling across different resources and countries. IDA is applied to attribute changes in the energy use to explanatory factors. Finally, DEA allows to estimate performance gaps for the carbon emission. As regards the carbon emission, we focus on energy-related carbon emission (i.e., energy sector in the IPCC inventory) rather than those from land use (changes) and manure management. The data for empirical analysis come from the World Input-Output Database (Timmer et al., 2015) and cover the period of 1995-2009.

Keywords: Agriculture; Lithuania; Sustainable development; Energy; Efficiency.

Baležentis, T. 2017. Analysing the Energy-Economy-Environment Nexus in Agriculture: Applications of Frontier and Index Decomposition Techniques, In Sustainable Development: crisis or regulation? : Scientific Monograph, Podgorica: ELIT; SPH; CSZ, p. 419-473. ISBN 978-9940-673-10-9 [The National Library in Montenegro, Cetinje].