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For years we have been observing the exponential trend of the economic growth, energy consumption, mineral resources use and greenhouse gas emissions. The human population is exerting an increasing pressure on the environment, which in the highly industrialised regions has lost its natural ability for bio-capacity. The measurement of the member states’ progress in achieving the sustainable development is an integral part of the European Union strategy. The article deals with methods of measuring the level of sustainable development and presents diversification of the EU member states according to the synthetic indicators, such as: domestic material consumption, import dependency, risky external energy supply, diversity index, ecological footprint and total carbon intensity. These determinants affecting potential of the EU states to maintain the achieved level of development in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the causal relationship between economic growth and renewable energy consumption using data for 28 countries of European Union, taken from Eurostat database for years from 1995 to 2015. In addition, motivated by EU Directive 2009/28/EC, the tendency of the share of renewable energy consumption into the final energy consumption is analysed. Various panel data techniques implemented in EViews are used. The empirical results suggest a positive impact of renewable energy consumption on economic growth, and emphasize bidirectional or unidirectional Granger causalities between the two macroeconomic indicators, for each country in the panel. These results justify the political decisions of EU concerning the necessity of increasing the renewable energy consumption, and prove that this type of energy consumption has a strong positive impact on economic growth. Thus, the inclusion of such policies in future EU and national strategies is further motivated. Finally, by means of linear regression, an increasing trend was found for the ratio between renewable energy consumption and final energy consumption for all but one of the EU countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]