Search results

Logistic transportation works is considered the main pollutant for the environment, with over 25 per cent CO2 emissions in the EU. This situation has raised concerns for the EU and governments to find solutions and impose regulations to diminish the environmental impact. The purpose of this paper is to investigate two questions regarding environmental issues connected to transportation; "What are the recent trends for establishing sustainable logistics for different transportation methods?" "Which alternatives can be incentivized to decrease the environmental impact of transportation activities?" These projects among the most noteworthy environmental benefits, which are also the case studies of this research are The Viking Concept, The WestMed Bridge, Scandinavian Shuttle and Baxter Inland Sea Transport. The result highlighted in this research is that shifting transportation modes has been successfully implemented, with considerable positive outcomes in terms of environment impact, cost and lead times in several European Union funded projects.

The article deals with the issue of health care, focusing on expenditure allocated to it. The first part of the article reviews some selected European Union countries, analyzing their expenditure on their health care sectors. The second part brings an analysis of expenditure on health care in Poland. Basing on this analysis we determine the state of the Polish health care sector. Moreover, as regards the Polish health care sector, we indicate the expenditure forecasts. The article concludes with a comparison of the state of the Polish system to the state of the systems in other European countries.

The purpose of the article is to find out which group of EU countires determined on the basis of the specific features of the area structure of their farms Poland belongs to. Two aspects of this structure were taken into account: the number of farms in particular size groups of farmland and the area of farmland they occupy. Poland's situation was also presented in the regional context, taking into consideration the variety of agricultural activity. The research was based on data obtained from Eurostat and Statistics Poland for the year 2016. The following groups of farm area were considered: farmland under 2 hectares, 2–5 hectares, 5–10 hectares, 10–20 hectares, 20–50 hectares and 50 hectares and larger. Based on the fuzzy classification method, EU countries were classified into 4 groups according to the area structure of their farms. The results of the research demonstrated that Poland belongs to a group of countries with a high level of fragmentation of farms, jointly with Croatia, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Italy. Only 4 countries have a more fragmented farm structure: Bulgaria, Cyprus, Romania and Hungary. As regards the proportion of the area of farmland concentrated in large farms, it is unfavourable in Poland, also when compared to new EU member states, such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria. In Poland the largest farms, with an area of at least 50 hectares, account only for about 1/3 of the total farmland, which, except for Slovenia, is the lowest percentage in the entire EU.

Productivity performance in European countries has been a policy concern for some time. This paper shows that productivity can be enhanced by product market policies which, by increasing competition and efficiency, facilitate higher rates of firms' entry and exit (i.e., firm churning). Drawing on annual country-sector data for the period 2000-2014 across the EU countries, we find that: (i) competition-enhancing regulation is associated with a higher rate of firm churning; (ii) business churning, in turn, appears to be positively related to higher total factor productivity at the sector level by facilitating the entry of new competitive firms and the exit of less productive ones. Overall, we conclude that stringent product market regulation can be indirectly associated, via its impact on business dynamism, with the somewhat weak productivity performance in a number of EU countries. Thus, our results point towards significant productivity gains that could follow from the introduction of further competition-enhancing measures in product markets.

The increased final consumption exacerbates the problem of the scarcity of natural resources and leads to environmental pollution. The concept of circular economy, which implies the formation of closed-loop chains of production and consumption with maximum regeneration and recycling of materials, is considered as an alternative to the firmly established "linear economy" (take-make-dispose). As a part of sustainable development strategy, the European Union adopted a general policy on the transition to a circular economy. However, for objective reasons, such transition is quite uneven at the level of member countries, which adversely affects the total progress. Therefore, the need arises to assess the positions of individual countries and identify major reasons for the uneven transition to support the countries that are lagging.The goal of the study is to identify the factors of uneven progress of the EU countries towards a circular economy. For that reason, a set of empirical data (20 indicators) has been compiled; cluster, classification, and parametric analyses have been conducted. As a result, three clusters of the EU countries have been obtained and six indicators, included into combinations that make all clusters different, have been identified. These indicators can be interpreted as the key factors contributing to the uneven progress of the EU countries towards a circular economy. The difference in harmonic means by clusters allowed quantitatively estimating a "circular gap". It is of practical value for the EU policy aimed at bridging the gaps between member countries during the transition to a circular economy.

This analysis explored the effect of battery electric vehicles (BEVs) on greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) in a panel of twenty-nine countries from the European Union (EU) from 2010 to 2020. The method of moments quantile regression (MM-QR) was used, and the ordinary least squares with fixed effects (OLSfe) was used to verify the robustness of the results. The MM-QR support that in all three quantiles, economic growth causes a positive impact on GHGs. In the 50th and 75th quantiles, energy consumption causes a positive effect on GHGs. BEVs in the 25th, 50th, and 75th quantiles have a negative impact on GHGs. The OLSfe reveals that economic growth has a negative effect on GHGs, which contradicts the results from MM-QR. Energy consumption positively impacts GHGs. BEVs negatively impacts GHGs. Although the EU has supported a more sustainable transport system, accelerating the adoption of BEVs still requires effective political planning to achieve net-zero emissions. Thus, BEVs are an important technology to reduce GHGs to achieve the EU targets of decarbonising the energy sector. This research topic can open policy discussion between industry, government, and researchers, towards ensuring that BEVs provide a climate change mitigation pathway in the EU region.

The aim of this paper is to determine the influence of the Common Agricultural Policy&rsquo ; s (CAP) subsidies on the level of economic sustainability of farms by means of three-fold study. To determine the economic sustainability of farms the authors applied the income gap ratio. Next, the level of income differentiation between farms of various economic classes was established. The last part consisted of the recognition of statistically significant CAP schemes that shape agricultural income in farms of different size and in assessing how the respective subsidies should increase or decrease to fill the recognized gap, based on the coefficients of panel regression. The spatial scope covered all EU countries in 2005&ndash ; 2015. Results show that due to the CAP&rsquo ; s support the average income of farms has approached the average non-agricultural income, but distribution of this support favored the largest farms, increasing disparities within the sector.