Anna Tykhonenko

Estimating country-specific environmental Kuznets curves from panel data: a Bayesian shrinkage approach

Designing an efficient global climate policy turns out to be a difficult yet crucial task since there are noteworthy cross-country differences in energy and carbon intensities. In this article, the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) hypothesis is tested for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and as a modelling technique, the iterative Bayesian shrinkage procedure is employed to handle the cross-country differences. The results suggest that first the EKC hypothesis is rejected for 47 out of the 51 countries considered when the heterogeneity in countries’ energy efficiencies and cross-country differences in the CO2 emissions trajectories are accounted for; second, a classification of the results with respect to the development levels of the countries concerned reveals that the emergence of an overall inverted U-shaped curve is due to the fact that in high-income countries increase in gross domestic product (GDP) decreases emissions, while in low-income countries emissions and GDP are positively correlated.

Balkan Countries: Catching Up and their Integration in the European Financial System

This paper aims to show the impact of financial variables on the process of convergence between selected European Union and Balkan countries. Indeed, after a delay in the realization of structural changes – result of historical legacy and circumstances in which the transition process took place – Balkan countries started at the end of 1990s essential reforms in their financial systems with the adoption of concrete measures directed towards the growth and increase of the financial sector efficiency. So, using panel data over the period 1999-2007 for a sample of 21 countries, we test the convergence’s hypothesis by the Bayesian iterative estimation method; two financial variables are introduced to control the differences in steady state. Our empirical results sustain the importance of the domestic credit and the market capitalization in the catching-up process by a significant increase in the speed of convergence.