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The energy crisis caused first by the COVID-19 pandemic and continued by the Russo-Ukrainian War has demonstrated that energy is a determining factor in the conduct of activities of any state. Several studies have examined the relationship between energy consumption and economic growth, developing various theories, but there is no consensus. This study investigates relationships by analyzing several regression models and choosing the fittest. Then, the verification of its validity is performed through the neural network, which gives greater credibility to the results obtained. Furthermore, using a structural analysis, the investigation is expanded to ranking the impact of sector-specific energy consumption on economic growth. The research includes data from 1995 to 2020 for the European Union (EU) and Romania. The results indicate that short-term energy consumption can have a positive or negative impact on economic growth, both in the EU and Romania. The structural analysis highlights the direct and indirect effects, with different intensities, of sector-specific energy consumption on economic growth. This study is interested primarily in the conditions of uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russo-Ukrainian War, to enable the EU and each member state to take effective energy policy measures to ensure their energy security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the relationship between the following indicators: income inequality, gross domestic product, risk of poverty threshold and median equivalized net income for a panel of 28 countries of European Union (EU) over the period 2005-2016. Two theoretical regression models, a linear and a quadratic one, are used to estimate the influence on income inequality of the other three indicators. Empirical estimations, using panel data techniques on three different data panels, confirm the Kuznets hypothesis that income inequality tends to increase with early economic development and tends to decrease when a country reaches a certain level of development. We found that for emerging EU countries, income inequality has a growing tendency with a positive economic growth and maybe reduced by increasing risk of poverty threshold or median equivalized net income. For highly developed EU countries the situation is completely opposite. At EU level, the influence of gross domestic product on income inequality is strongly determined by its trend in the highly developed EU countries, while the influence of risk of poverty threshold and median equivalized net income on income inequality is strongly determined by their trend in the emerging EU countries. [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]

This study proposes a generalized grey Lotka–Volterra model with a finite number of variables. The model is obtained by applying the grey modelling method to estimate the parameters of a finite dimensional quadratic Lotka–Volterra system. Subsequently, the model is used to analyze the competition and cooperation relationship between four macroeconomic indicators, namely Gross Domestic Product, Export, Import and Investment, and to obtain short-time forecasting for them. The data used in the empirical investigation cover the time periods 2005–2022 and 2011–2022, for the European Union. The empirical results are compared to the ones obtained by using the grey model G M (1,1) and the two-dimensional grey Lotka–Volterra model. Finally, economic interpretations of the empirical findings are formulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on economic growth and electricity consumption and investigates the hypothesis of the influence of this consumption on the gross domestic product (GDP) for Romania. Using time series on monthly electricity consumption and quarterly GDP and a multi-linear regression model, we performed an analysis of the evolution of these indicators for 2007–2020, a comparison between their behavior during the financial crisis vs. COVID-19 crisis, and empirically explore the relationships between GDP and electricity consumption or some of its components. The results of the analysis confirm that the shock of declining activity due to the COVID-19 pandemic had a severe negative impact on electric energy consumption and GDP in the first half of 2020, followed by a slight recovery. By using a linear regression model, long-term relationships between GDP and domestic and non-household electricity consumptions were found. The empirically estimated elasticity coefficients confirm the more important impact of non-household electricity consumption on GDP compared to the one of domestic electricity consumption. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the results of the study could be useful for optimizing energy and economic growth policies at the national and European levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]