Energy use and economic growth in the Visegrád Four countries: absolute or relative decoupling?

Abstract

A core question and main objective of sustainability theory is to maintain economic activity with decreasing resource use and environmental impact. The greatest challenge of the current century is to shift toward the green, low-carbon economy and to use resources more effectively.

After the regime change, energy intensity significantly improved in the Visegrád Four countries. In the long run, economic development can go together with decreasing energy contributing to economic and environmental sustainability and, indirectly, to the reduction of environmental impact. Technological development and economic structure changes allow production to meet people’s needs in a less energy-intensive way.

In this study, we applied two different decoupling indicators to examine the delinking of the energy consumption from economic growth and the decoupling of natural resource use from economic growth (or resource decoupling) in the Visegrád Four countries (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia and Hungary) during the 1990–2015 period. In light of these results, we draw conclusions about impact decoupling (i.e. decoupling environmental impacts from economic growth) using ecological footprint and biocapacity data. The paper pays special attention to the economies’ recession years. Our decoupling effect estimations are optimistic: these economies performed absolute or relative decoupling during a significant part of the considered period. However, we consider the 2009–2013 intervals a structural break, because in these years we did not detect decoupling and only found weak negative, strong negative and expansive negative decoupling. This suggests that decoupling does not become a permanent process: even after one and half decades (such as for Poland between 1994 and 2009), the positive tendency can turn around. The analysis of the ecological footprint also shows that examining energy consumption reveals not only resource decoupling but also impact decoupling.

The decoupling process is an important sign for decision makers of a country to assess the effectiveness of their environmental policy. There are many devices allowing delinking energy consumption from economic growth including industrial production restructuring and supporting energy efficiency and saving policies.