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Environmental Kuznets curve for EU agriculture: empirical evidence from new entrant EU countries

Environmental Science and Pollution Research volume 24, pages 15510–15520 (2017)Cite this article

Abstract

The present work examines the intertemporal causal relationship between environmental damage from carbon emissions released by agriculture per 1000 ha of utilized agriculture area and economic performance in the sector of agriculture as described by net value added per capita. The autoregressive distributed lag bounds testing approach is employed to examine this linkage, for three new entrant EU countries, namely, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, and Hungary. The environmental Kuznets hypothesis is confirmed in the long run for Bulgaria and Czech Republic while in the short run is validated only for the case of Czech Republic. The results indicate that the adoption of environment-friendly farming practices and crops’ selection does not secure simultaneous high economic and environmental performance at least in the short run for our sample countries and also in the long run for Hungary necessitating the modification of the agro–environmental measures adopted to make those two targets complementary and not mutually exclusive for a farmer.

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Agricultural Development, Democritus University of Thrace, Pantazidou 193, 68200, Orestiada, Greece

    Eleni Zafeiriou & Xanthi Partalidou

  2. Environmentalist, Economist, Decentralized Authority of Macedonia – Thrace, Androutsou 63, 55132, Kalamaria, Greece

    Spyros Sofios

Authors
  1. Eleni Zafeiriou
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  2. Spyros Sofios
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  3. Xanthi Partalidou
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Correspondence to Eleni Zafeiriou.

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Responsible editor: Philippe Garrigues

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Zafeiriou, E., Sofios, S. & Partalidou, X. Environmental Kuznets curve for EU agriculture: empirical evidence from new entrant EU countries. Environ Sci Pollut Res 24, 15510–15520 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-017-9090-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11356-017-9090-6

Keywords

  • CAP
  • Agro–environmental policy
  • New EU member states
  • Sustainable agriculture