Abstract:

Starting from the decisions of the European Union (EU) to reduce energy consumption by 20% by 2020 the overall objective of this paper is to analyze the impact energy consumption on the development of the EU countries, thus implicitly the gross domestic product (GDP) of these countries. To this aim, the study realized in the paper was carried out in two directions: firstly, we analyze the evolution of GDP in the EU countries, and secondly, we analyze the influence of final energy consumption (FEC) on GDP of each EU country. For this we collect the information provided by Eurostat for the period 2006-2016 for the 28 EU states members on the evolution of macroeconomic indicators: GDP and FEC (nominal and on capita). We analyze these series of data using the EViews 9 econometric software package. The Dickey-Fuller and Philips-Perron unit roots tests and the Granger causality standard test were applied to examine the relationship between GDP and FEC at both nominal and per capita. The results of the analysis did not indicate a cointegration relationship between the studied variables, but this can be considered as a positive element, because the reduction of the final energy consumption can lead to the reduction of the gas emissions, which can have a beneficial effect on the economic development and implicitly of living standards. However, in developing countries there is still the possibility of increasing FEC leading to GDP growth, and positive shocks in GDP per capita cause positive shocks in the FEC.