This paper investigates the relationship between economic growth, greenhouse gas emissions and other factors based on the panel data of 22 countries of the EU in the period 1995–2014. The fixed effect panel model was used as a framework for the analysis. The novel contribution of this paper is that the factors of economic growth, energy consumption, energy taxes as well as R&D were tested in one expanded EKC model, including the data of three Baltic States. The regression coefficients referring to GDP, Energy consumption have a positive sign, while R&D and Energy taxes have a negative sign. The empirical analysis combines two steps of evaluation of panel models of different groups of countries. The results imply that the analysed factors (energy consumption, energy taxes as well as R&D) can be applied to adjust the EKC trend in the region and might be useful for the climate change policy adjustment.

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Abstract. The paper analyses the fiscal decentralization effects on economic growth in unitary countries of European Union for the period 2005-2014. The empirical analysis was based on the multiple regression method. The fixed effect panel model was used as framework for the analysis. In order to examine the different impact of fiscal decentralization, the same analysis was applied to subsets of countries categorized into two groups according to countries' level of economic development. This further analysis found that there is positive relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth in low level of economically developing countries and no relationship in high level of economically developed countries. These results suggested that fiscal decentralization is not always instrument for promotion of economic growth, which means that country's economic development level is an important factor when introducing reform of fiscal decentralization. The originality of this article -new fiscal decentralization index and evaluated fiscal decentralization level influence for countries economic growth.

Abstract.There is no complete overview or discussion of the literature of the economics of federalism and fiscal decentralization, even though scholarly interest in the topic has been increasing significantly over recent years. This paper provides a general, brief but comprehensive overview of the main insights from the literature on fiscal federalism and decentralization. In doing so, literature on fiscal federalism and decentralization is grouped into two main approaches: "first generation of theories" and "second generation of theories".

Fiscal decentralization has been widely discussed at various levels and from various perspectives. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (the OECD), similar to the World Bank, also pays great attention to it. Fiscal decentralization has always been an interesting investigation topic, and the researchers, in addition to considering the future of the economy, study this problem from different perspectives, i.e. geographic, political and others. The effect of fiscal decentralization on the economic development of the state has been investigated by various authors. Three different hypotheses provide the proofs of the positive effect of fiscal decentralization. The main advantage of fiscal federalism are efficient and adequate public services which are provided locally through the mobility of the citizens, voting power and competition between the local governments in the created ecosystem. The potential advantages of the competition among the local government powers are similar to the advantages associated with the competition on the private markets. The paper is focussed on fiscal decentralization of the state. It aims to investigate the theoretical aspect of the impact of fiscal decentralization on the economic development to calculate the index of fiscal decentralization and to evaluate the effect of fiscal decentralization on the economic development in the particular states of the European Union. Thus, Bulgaria and Lithuania have the lowest fiscal decentralization index of , while the Czech Republic has the highest index (0.46). The researchers have proved the effect of fiscal decentralization on the economic development of the EU-13 states to be statistically significant and positive. The originality of this paper is that it introduces a theoretical model for evaluating the fiscal decentralization effect on the economic development and assesses the fiscal decentralization effect on the economic development of the particular EU-13 states.